


in dreams where I've been

by Goose_Boy



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Elf Jaskier | Dandelion, M/M, Magic Jaskier, Minor Character Death, No beta we die like stregobor should, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, This gets worse before it gets better, Underage Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:14:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 40,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27376282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goose_Boy/pseuds/Goose_Boy
Summary: Weeds never die, even when they should.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 18
Kudos: 95





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mukur0](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mukur0/gifts), [saintsurvivor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintsurvivor/gifts).



> This is going to be really long, I'm warning you now. Due to that, updates are going to be slow, so thank you in advance for those who stick around. This started as a character study and took on a mind of its own, and now we're here. I recommend the playlist with it, its the songs that went into writing this.  
> Special thanks to mukur0 and saintsurvivor for listening to me scream about this.  
> Enjoy!  
> If you like my stuff, why not buy me a cup of coffee? https://ko-fi.com/goose_boy

Julek was five the first time it happened. 

He had wanted to make his Mama a flower crown because the Lady wore one even though his Mama was prettier than her. His Mama was nicer too, she danced with him in the estate’s great big kitchen and made sure he always had a full belly. She smiled a lot, laughed a lot, and always sang whenever she worked. She gave him fresh bread and braided flowers into his hair, and always gave him long hugs until his toes couldn’t touch the ground and all he could smell was the cloud of sugar and rosemary that followed her everywhere. 

His Mama didn’t have any of the fancy, shiny things that the Lady did, and that wasn’t fair, but that was okay. Because things weren’t always fair, and things weren’t always nice, but his Mama said they were okay. 

She smiled and brushed fingers covered in flour through his hair until he laughed and tried to dance away and told him that sometimes things weren’t fair. They didn’t have the things that the Lady had, but they had plenty of food and they had beds that were just theirs. 

His Mama didn’t have a pretty crown like the Lady did, but his Mama _needed_ a crown. 

She always called him a Prince, and all of the stories said that Queens wore crowns. 

Flour in her dark curling hair and a lilting song in his Grandfather’s tongue, she’d curled her nose at him when he’d run outside. 

It had rained and rained and rained for the last few days like the sky had had too many tears built up for it to hold. The ground had tried to drink it all up but it hadn't been thirsty enough. The ground had swelled and turned to mud, deep puddles forming out in the gardens that he stomped through on bare feet. The rain washed away most of the dirt, and his Mama had taken to just sitting him by one of the stone ovens to dry him off.

The mud was no place for flowers, but Julek didn't need a lot of them. Just enough to make a crown, but he wasn't really sure how much was enough. More than ten, more than two or three tens maybe, but he could figure that out when he found them.

There weren't any flowers in the puddles, but there was mud that squished between his toes with sticky sounds. Grinning, spinning around in the muck, Julek threw his arms out wide and laughed in the pouring rain. His tunic grew heavy with water and tried to slip from either shoulder, hands raised up high to chase it back where it belonged. Sopping wet and his curls clumped around his eyes and it was with the faint lisp of a child missing teeth that he sang as he went.

"Rain clouds, rain clouds, come to stay. Lotsa rain in the garden so Julek can play!"

His stomping feet kicked up arches of muddy water, the splatter lost under the curtain of rain as it fell. Beneath the smell of watery soil and wet grass, there was something brighter, petrichor and ozone shimmering in the air. The swamp of puddles trembled from deep below where every kick of mud had landed as something grew. As little tender blossoms sprouted from beneath the surface, dandelions and buttercups and little white-faced daisies that bloomed and grew by the dozen. 

"Rain for the flowers and rain for the hay, so...so...um."

Cerulean eyes blinked hard, little cherub face scrunched up in thought. He didn't know how to finish his rhyme, and maybe Mama wouldn't mind. 

His worry was lost when he found the flowers, more than he needed to make a crown pretty enough. Gasping, mouth open wide and Julek squealed, bending nearly in half to stare at a dandelion. Yellow and bright and cheery where everything else was sad and wet and grey and he grinned. Those were enough, those were perfect, his Mama would look like a Queen with those flowers in her hair!

Hands cupped around a dandelion and he pressed a puckered kiss to the blossom.

"Thank you!"

That single flower went untouched, left to grow however it wanted as he snapped the stem of every other dandelion, buttercup, and little daisy. He ended up with an arm full, more than he could have possibly needed but maybe he could make a crown for Zophea too! She could have all the daisies, like a crown of little stars in her red hair, and then his Mama could have all of the dandelions and buttercups. Like a crown of gold!

It was with his armful and his excitement that Julek ran through the open doorway for the kitchen. A trail of water and mud followed him across the threshold, into the smooth stone-paved kitchen where his feet smacked against the floor.

Little prints of his bare feet made a mess as he went as he ran, ducking beneath the arm of the butler as the man swore. He didn’t see the chaos that he left in his wake or feel the way that it clung to his skin, and instead, he twisted around the hall of the servants quarters until he could stand in the kitchen. Rainwater dripping from the points of his ears and his clothes, he felt soggy like a rag left too long in a bucket but Julek grinned all the same. Everbright eyes and a childish little squeal of love untainted as he found first her hair, then the blue of her eyes as she turned to him. 

“Mama, look!”

A furrow between her brows like when people frowned and he could see the way she sighed with a big heave of her shoulders. She smiled though, dimpled and happy and warm like she always was when she smiled at him. 

“ _Julek_.”

-

The first snow of that season came without warning from the sea, a harsh fall of thick flakes that crushed all of the autumnal colors beneath a smothering blanket. The Pankratz estate carried on, well used to such sea-born winters after many generations and it would weather this one with the same dignity and poise. Snow piled along the outer walls like diamond dunes, spilling so high in some places that the servants’ children could slide down the slopes on crudely fashioned sleds. Thick sheets of ice-encrusted along exterior hinges, making them rattle and groan, and the windows all received an extra pane from the frozen sheets.

As the natural light spilling in turned blue, the kitchen became one of the warmest places in the manor. Quickly crowded when the staff had but a moment to themselves, it was surely the easiest place to hide oneself when some attempt at idle work on the grounds was no longer viable. Few ventured out unless they absolutely had to, wrapped in heavy cloaks and thick woven wools to try and stave off the chill. 

They shouldn't have been outside, but Julek stood in the arch for the rear entrance all bundled in a cloak far too long and watched his Mama on her knees in the snow. 

She had pulled at the same dandelion for so long the points of his ears had begun to burn with the cold, a pile of brilliant yellow flowers growing at her side as she dug at the earth frantically. It came back every time she plucked it, fast and resilient, and damning against the whitewash of winter. 

He wouldn't understand her desperation until later in life, but Julek would never forget the way her cries carried on the biting wind.

" _No, no, no, please Dana Meadbh no!"_

-

The piles of snow melted off before the wind stopped its biting, winter long thawed into spring before the world began to warm. Like the arctic clutches of the sea had to hold on for just a little longer, needed to sink its fingers in just that much more. The change seemed to happen overnight, tender fresh green where the snow had turned to thin, watery slush. Flowers sprang up with the rising sun and the air became tepid as the world awoke from its slumber of short days. 

Imbaelk came and went with barely a celebration, honeycakes dripping in sticky rosemary syrup and a candle burning in every window the only things they could afford. They didn’t have time for much more than that, the day overtaken and shadowed by the birth of the Lord and Lady’s daughter. A squalling little thing with no hair and flushed, mottled skin, she came into the world screaming like little Julek had never heard before. The whole manor rang with it, and he stopped with his washing to listen, hands buried in fizzy bubbles from tallow and lye where he should have been cleaning sheets. 

The new baby came in screaming just like the Lady went out with a wet sigh, but Julek didn’t know that. He just knew the cold feeling that swept through the manor like a mid-winters breeze from an unshuttered window. It bit at his bones even if his skin still stayed warm, his insides cramping painfully at the harsh, icy plunge. 

Death paused at the boy, embraced him and swept through him with a single flowing motion that left him gasping down at the washtub and its sodden linen. 

He didn’t understand because he didn’t know, but Death and Destiny traced their fingers through his hair and lamented the horrors of what would befall such a child before they were forced to carry on their way. 

“Mama, what’s happening?”

He asked hours later, once the sheets had all been washed and he’d hung them up to dry with help from Daphe and Wim. Last Imbaelk had been loud in the kitchen, chattering voices with mulled wine that he wasn’t allowed to drink and plates of honeycakes that got taken from him after he’d had too many. So much food that his belly had ached, he remembered falling asleep in his Mama’s lap at the servant’s table in the small room where they all tried to fit themselves. It had been warm and wonderful, and nothing like the heavy quiet that he could feel like he’d felt that cold. 

A hush had taken over the entire household apart from the wailing of a baby that didn’t know when to stop, hadn’t learned that the Lord didn’t want children to be heard. It would figure it out eventually because it had to, like Julek had learned to use the gifts his mother had given him and listen harder than he should have. Easier to not get caught in places he shouldn’t have been if the Lord and Lady never found him, but there was something missing. He didn’t like it and he didn’t understand. 

Imbaelk was supposed to be warm, bright, there should have been people laughing, but every candle set in a window had been snuffed.

“We won’t celebrate today, Julek.”

His Mama didn’t smile now, copper and iron hoops in her ears so heavy that the pointed tips drooped down. She still had her pretty necklace on, the one with stones that shimmered like the moon on the water, she hadn’t taken any of her things off but she hadn’t given him a honeycake. Nobody had put on wine to mull, the kitchen was quiet where servants scurried about in the halls. Things weren’t going like they were supposed to, nothing was like it should have been and he felt a strange, tight heat start up in his chest. 

“Why?”

The washtub she used was nearly as tall as he, sloshing with water that gave off wafts of steam and bubbled lye. They weren’t supposed to do dishes today, those should have been done tomorrow when his Mama grumbled about a headache and Zophea laughed too loud with all of her teeth. Mosend wasn’t there to clean out the ovens yet for their first scrub of spring, and nobody had told him and Vali that they needed to be washing down the floors with soap and rags. It was as if they had skipped the savaed all together, they had gone right past everything that he’d been promised like he’d overslept. 

He hadn’t overslept, he had done his chores and made sure to keep his feet clean.

“Because Lord Pankratz has said not to.”

Soapsuds up to her elbows, they sloshed around in the washtub as she scoured at whatever pans laid within. Everything smelled like soap where they should have roasted lamb for the main table, there should have been spices and scraps of potatoes for him to chew on while his Mama twirled around the kitchen. She didn’t dance now though, bent over like she was going to fall into the washtub with her dark curls all tangled on top of her head. 

“Why?”

His Mama looked sad, but not just sad. Like sad wasn’t good enough, a pinch between her eyes that he had only seen in the winter from the dandelion that wouldn’t die. 

“Because the Lady is dead, so we have to pretend to mourn.”

“Shiassiol!”

Zophea cried out from her own post across the kitchen and his Mama straightened, dirty water across the front of her pretty dress. Her best dress, the undyed cream threaded through with flowers and pretty strings, she’d worn it for Imbaelk as she had back at Midinvaerne and Belleteyn. It didn’t look so pretty now, she shouldn’t have been on the floor in it, but she didn’t look sad when she stared at Zophea. She looked angry, like when Linus had almost gotten him kicked by that horse in autumn, like Zophea had done something wrong. 

“Shiassiol, you cannot speak so plainl-”

“My child will not fear death, Zophea, nor will I lie to him.”

A spitting, cat like sound, the two women stared at one another with the length of the kitchen between them and Julek felt that hot flush once more. Wet and tight and he hated it, could feel it in his throat like he needed to cry, needed to scream. 

He clutched at the cloth lamb that never left his reach and watched both of them with over wide eyes. 

Zophea’s mouth moved, but her words were strange, garbled and sharp sounding. She spoke like the Lord then, like the Lady had even if she couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t speak anymore. Common and he didn’t know Common, crackling and empty where the words he knew had always been warm. They talked about him like he was in trouble, like he had done something wrong, a shaking head or a pointing hand and he didn’t know what they were saying but he knew enough. 

“He will not mourn for a man who licked my tears as he ruined me.”

There was meaning there, there was something, and his Mama’s voice had gone brittle and angry, hurt. Like she could fill the whole kitchen with it, like she wanted to throw something. His heart hurt from how strong it tried to beat, as if it thought it could come out of his chest when it had to stay there. Hands tight at the lamb’s legs until his knuckles went white, until his fingers shook and Julek started to pant at the heat beneath his skin, the pressure sitting quick and heavy on his chest. 

“Shiassiol!”

He couldn’t keep it in, mouth falling open on a silent scream as his hands pressed to his ears. Lamb forgotten in his lap and his eyes scrunched tight, he missed the way that both women startled as the washtubs shook and sloshed. As the soapy water within them heaved and rose up to splatter and spread across the ceiling like it belonged there. The half scrubbed pots followed with clanging sounds, the washtubs trembling beneath their own weight like they too wanted to join the collection of misplaced things on the ceiling where they shouldn’t have been. 

Warm hands on him, sugar and rosemary and the mallow of soap all fighting for his nose, his body jostled as he was scooped off the floor and into his Mama’s lap instead. 

“It’s alright flower, Mama’s got you. Let it go Julek, I’m right here.” Gentle humming and her heart beneath his hand, she curved over him until he couldn’t see anything but her eyes, the weighted droop of her pointed ears. Nothing past her face and the curling pile of her hair, she pressed their foreheads together as she rocked them. Curled her body over his and held him tight, safe like she always did. “There you go _me wedd_ , it’s alright.”

A _woosh_ in his ears and all the water came back down like a burst of rain. Wet curls and the water dripped from her ears, but Julek stayed dry as it all came crashing down. 

“There we go Julek, all better.”

Her smile was as wet as her eyes as she pressed shaking fingers through his hair, Zophea’s voice ringing with a soft prayer across the room. 

-

Someone named the baby Anonte. 

It hadn’t been the Lady, and it probably hadn’t been the Lord, but someone had named her Anonte. Which, if anyone asked Julek, was a bad, stupid name. Nobody ever asked Julek though, because Julek wasn’t supposed to mess with the baby. He wasn’t supposed to get _caught_ messing with the baby, because if nobody caught him than nobody could be angry. 

_If_ someone had asked, he would have named her Enra or Iloze or Soleen, pretty names even though she wasn’t very pretty. Her skin was all splotchy and she never stopped crying, and her ears were _round_. 

Everything about her was round, from her face to her fists to the sausage like pudge of her arms and legs. Vidrann had had his baby over Lammas but Meela’s ears were sharp like his, like Julek’s, so Anonte’s should have been pointed too. Because babies were round and squishy and made lots of messes and had pointed ears, they had to have all these things or they weren’t babies. So Anonte wasn’t a baby, but she was _something_ , even if Julek wasn’t quite sure what. 

Nobody yelled at him when he crept into her nursery, bare feet cold against the stone floors. He was supposed to be outside helping with the hens and the geese, but the baby was supposed to be crying. That made two of them doing something they shouldn’t have, but he wouldn’t tell if she didn’t. Quiet for once and he didn’t think Anonte would tell on him, but he didn’t trust her like he did Daphe or Wim. 

Hands grasping at the edge of her cradle and he pulled up onto his toes for a peek. Kept himself stable even as he puffed, jumped a bit for a glimpse. Not tall enough to see past the edge, and it wasn’t fair when he couldn’t even hear her. 

Falling flat footed with a huff, Julek frowned first at the too tall crib and then the rest of the room as he spun around. Standing on books wouldn’t make him tall enough and the books hadn’t done anything wrong. There was a chair in the corner that looked too fancy for him to be allowed to touch it, but Anonte wouldn’t see him because he couldn’t see her. Anonte wouldn’t tell because she couldn’t see him, because she couldn’t speak yet, because she wasn’t crying, and that felt strange. 

Babies _always_ cried, his Mama said he had he’d cried so much she didn’t think she’d slept his first year; Julek pulled the chair across the floor and listened to the low squeal its feet made. His progression went in a series of starts and stops, eyes locked on the closed door just to make sure. It wouldn’t fix anything if someone opened it, but at least he would know they were there. Nobody came running the entire time, so maybe the chair wasn’t that loud, or maybe they just didn’t care, and he pushed the seat of it all the way up against the crib. Climbed up to stand on the seat of it with his hands braced on the edge of the crib. 

On tiptoe to look down into the crib, rocked forward just enough that the edge of it bit into his ribs, and she was-

Quiet. 

Not a single little sound, but even Meela made noises in her sleep. 

Her little hands were all balled up into pudgy fists and there was a blanket that looked softer than any he’d ever touched pulled up to her shoulders. It didn’t look like a very comfortable way to sleep, but she wasn’t crying, so Julek wasn’t going to judge her. Her skin didn’t look as splotchy as it had when he had first seen her, so maybe she felt better, or maybe she wasn’t hungry. 

Rocking forward a little more so he could reach, Julek stretched as far as he could so he could touch the rounded top of her ear. Smooth and cool to the touch like when he had played out in the snow too long, but she must have been sleepy because she didn’t even twitch as he rubbed his finger back and forth. 

She was cold though, so Julek pulled her soft blanket up a little higher to her icy cheeks before moving the chair back to its corner and shutting the door behind him. 

-

Anonte died quietly at twenty-seven days old, the Lord married Phera of Roggeveen just in time for the first heavy rains to hit the coast, and Julek accidentally set the orchard on fire because he couldn’t keep his anger out of his fingers and in his chest. His Mama scrubbed the dirt and soot from his skin so hard he went pink and raw in places speaking in prayers and pleas. There was no singing then, no laughter, and he kept close to his Mama’s skirts as the Lord’s men investigated the event. He learned the word arson and watched the whole affair from the safety of the kitchen as the servants tried to keep some semblance of normalcy over the household. 

The feeling of fire tried to follow Julek everywhere he went, and he didn’t know it then, but that spring was the beginning of the end.

  
  


-

  
  


Dirt across his cheeks and he squinted against the bright flare of the sun. Pulled at the rope a little harder and clenched his teeth down on the end a little more to keep it from moving as he tied the length of it off. His jaw ached, held tight between the rope and the spiral of tension that had blistered under his skin all day. Thousands upon thousands of things that he wanted to say but couldn’t find the breath for, didn’t know the words for and they all festered there on the back of his tongue until they burned like soured wine. Easier to keep those things at bay when his hands were busy, trouble to cause and chores to be done before he was allowed to even think about lunch. 

It was easier to ignore the words when he kept his body in motion, but nothing stopped the wordless melodies that spilled from between chapped lips. Songs bore of sound and feeling without a word that he could place to them and they filled the hot summer air. Gave away his position up in the trees to anybody that ever needed him, but the branches held his weight like a resolute embrace. The leaves swayed with the sound of his voice and the world seemed bent on trying to bubble with the delicate fizz that made Sparking Cidaris Rose so potent. 

His Mama worked the kitchen with an iron fist, but Julek had been set loose on the grounds. Soil churned to his elbows in the gardens, sunlight dappled on his skin as he hoisted himself into the orange trees in the orchard. He could still feel the burning, the way the trees had screamed in earthen silence as the southern stretch went up in flames. Like flint had been struck in his chest until the embers billowed and grew with every leaf and branch and fruit that had fallen to ash. 

He gave his apologies in gentle hands and wordless songs offered to their deep buried roots and their high reaching branches. Until their fruit went as fat as his fist and their bodies grew heavy from the bounty they provided. 

This high up and the world smelled like oranges, sun-warmed and sweet in the mid-day heat. The Estate stretched on as far as he could see, trees that touched the sky and the promise of the coast just out of reach. He could see the village before he could even hope to see the ocean, but those waters called to him so sweetly that his bones ached. All the things he hadn't seen, the town he had never ventured into and the grounds that he hadn't left: he had never wandered past the high stone wall that retained the orchard and the pasture for all that his body cried to dance, to run until he collapsed from his exhaustion.

There were baskets heavy with oranges that he needed to take to the barn for sorting, there were crops that needed to be tended and fields that needed to be turned. He couldn't leave, not like he wanted to, not when there were things to do. Chores didn't afford him any time for leisure, his station didn't allow for liberties that he couldn't even begin to wrap his mind around. 

"Basket!"

Pulley untangled and the rope pulled, suddenly slack, he dropped the load as easily as he could. Friction burns on his palms long gone callused and numb to all but pressure, he tipped precariously to stare down through the branches. Fallen fruit left to rot and trodden leaves scattered across the dirt, the basket hit the ground with a quiet noise. There were no waiting hands, no drowsy brown eyes staring up at him like he’d done something perfect and stupid. A slight he often ignored, an argument waiting to happen if only he could taste that smile, but there was no smile waiting for him, there were no work roughed hands waiting below. 

There was _nothing_ save for the fallen leaves and a few fruits that would end up rotting before the week was over. 

“Wim?”

Pitching himself aside until he could dangle from the branch, the world twisted upside down as field grasses and trodden dirt became his sky. He couldn’t see him, no clue no matter which way he turned and Julek frowned. The other boy wouldn’t just leave him, they had plans and a system that they followed- Julek picked the fruit and Wim stored it, and they finished with their section in record time. They weren’t going to finish today with how the boy had disappeared, but Wim never just left him. 

Stretching until he could grasp another thick branch and Julek uncurled his legs, freed his original perch from the bend of his knees. His body dropped quickly through the air, a bit of a jar to his shoulders before he let go. He hit the ground in a wobbling crouch, bright bursts of tension in his knees where he hadn’t bent them with enough. Practice made perfect but he didn’t have time for that sort of thing, stumbling to a stand on uncertain legs as he spun around. 

There, a shoe almost two rows over and nearly out of sight, but he knew those clogs. A gift on his nameday from his parents, Wim wore them often and treated them with more care than he did his tools. He wouldn’t have just left one, and Julek darted across the orchard rows until he could pick up the discarded shoe. 

His fingers smeared in blood and he stilled, throat tight. 

“Wim, this isn’t funny!”

More blood in the grass, a few crushed oranges like something had been dragged through it. Like _Wim_ had been dragged through it, and Julek took a rattling breath as he followed the trail. Quick on quiet feet and there was blood in the air, the cloying reek of it that made him want to gag. And there, ahead, a figure he knew and a woman he didn’t pressed up against a tree. One of her slender thighs between Wim’s splayed legs, his hands scrabbled at her back like when Julek had to muffle his cries, but the tension felt different. Everything tasted like terror and decay, smelled like blood from her long spill of red hair to the way that soft gurgling sounds came from the other boy’s lips. 

He’d never seen a vampire in person, only the stories that Hiandre told at the table when the children hadn’t yet gone to bed. Vampires came in all different shapes and breeds, and they heralded the need for a Witcher, but Julek didn’t have time for a Witcher. 

Not with how Wim had started to stop fighting against her and he screamed. 

“Leave him alone!”

Black-eyed and a bloodied mouth, her head shouldn’t have turned that fast, she shouldn’t have moved that quickly. Wim hit the ground with a quiet sound and Julek screamed anew as she lunged at him, clawed fingers digging deep into his shoulders as she drove his body to the ground. He kicked out, balled fists and sharp knees but it mattered none with how she crowded over him. Smeared hot blood on his skin and wrenched his head aside with a single hand. Her breath was a well of wet copper and something foul, long dead and left to rot in the sun.

The slippery glide of a tongue across his throat and Julek spasmed beneath her. 

“ _Ngh_.”

Her tongue to his jaw before she slid back down to his throat with a sharp sting from her fangs. Like forge hot daggers against his jugular and his world spun with color and sensation as she sank her teeth into his flesh. Bright starburst of feeling that poured down his tongue and his head lulled aside as he arched beneath her. Arousal sparking in his blood and pooling in his abdomen that made his legs loose, gave her room to slip between them as he clutched at her nude form. 

As he blinked open bleary eyes with a moan to find Wim slumped against the tree trunk. 

Poison sticky anguish and a blinding flush of rage then, that was Wim gone pale like he shouldn’t ever be. An animalistic roar as the trees shook, as the ground tried to shiver and swell beneath them. His hands pounded at her chest as sparks flew, embers and black smoke and the sizzle of burning flesh and she screamed. Chittering, shrill and piercing as her body went up in flames and she fell aside to writhe in the dirt. Streaks of ash across his skin and Julek pulled himself upright only to fall to his knees, head spinning wildly. 

His hands blistered almost immediately, a part of his face and chest felt the same and he gagged, sobbed at the feeling as she burned.

-

Two days and Wim wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t speak to him. 

A bandage around the boy’s throat for the wrappings about his hands, his chest, half of his face swaddled with the softest bindings the healer had been able to afford them. His skin caught somewhere between the acute burn like it hadn’t ever stopped and an icy numbness, sleep had been difficult at best. His Mama had tried desperately to hide him away in the kitchen, and he would have happily hidden behind her skirts until the day he died if it meant someone spoke to him. Her steady hands and her familiar eyes, her smiles that trembled even when her voice stayed strong, he wanted to waste the rest of his days in her kitchen under her care. 

One didn’t deny a summons from the Lord. 

He knew this in theory if not in practice, a knobby-kneed boy of only sixteen years that gave his kisses and his affection freely. He sang to the flowers and the sky, to the dandelion in the courtyard that had been rooted for as long as he could remember and to the stars that left him behind every morning. He was a dreamer, a song-weaver, the orchard boy that crooned to the plants until they unfurled sweet-scented flowers against his fingers. Barefooted and dirty fingered no matter how much he tried to keep clean, he had no place beneath the Lord’s eye. 

He stood in shoes now, soft things that he had to wear when he was indoors lest he leave scuffs on the floors. Hands clasped behind him as best he could but it hurt, it pulled at his tender chest with a fiery sear and the skin felt too tight, smaller than his bones. Breathing ached but he did it anyway, didn’t know where to look as he stood in the grand hall that he had only ever been allowed to scrub maybe twice in his life. 

The Lord wasn’t an imposing man physically, Adral stood wider and Misel at least a head taller, but there was a gleam in his eyes that looked better suited for one of the snakes he often had to chase out of the chicken coops. A powerful man from the land that he owned and the precious coin spent on his clothes, the gleaming jewels upon his fingers. This Lord owned him, owned his mother, and something for the way his gaze slid over Julek as if he found him lacking made him feel like a hare quivering beneath the pursuit of the hunting hounds. 

He had never seen the Lord before, a sloped nose and a sharp cut jaw, he would have remembered those rounded ears and that human face. 

Wim stood but a few paces away, but the older boy suddenly felt like the stranger he had never been. Julek wanted to hold his hand like he often did, but it was like the Adalatte stretched between them. 

“Avanwimbrul, I need you to tell my friend everything that you told me.”

 _Friend_ doesn’t seem like the right word. 

The man standing to the Lord’s left exuded a casual presence that reeked of underlying power that Julek could feel beneath his skin. Like the man had oceans inside him, deep and calm at the surface. There was water rushing along his skin the longer he looked, the tidal rocking of the dark undertow in the man’s pale skin, his well-manicured beard. He reminded Julek of the lighthouse he could just barely see out off the coast, resolute and tall where it stretched toward the sky above the crashing waves. 

The Lord had never had friends like that, surely a man like that had never walked these halls. No, this wasn’t a friend, and this wasn’t a visit, and Julek felt a steady creep of nausea fill his belly. 

“W-we were in the Southern Orchard, my Lord, and there was this woman. She- I had to follow her, I didn’t want to but it was like I couldn’t get my feet to listen to me. And she pinned me to a tree and put her teeth in my throat, and he got her attention. I thought she was going to kill us, and he-”

Wim wouldn’t look at him, and Julek wanted to scream. A shriek without a sound trapped behind his teeth, he wanted to cry out until the other boy shouldn’t ignore him. Until Wim felt how he felt, wordless wailing pressing bruises into the other boy’s skin where Julek’s burned. Would he overlook him if he cried, would he pretend not to see him if he fell to his knees? 

“Go on.”

The Lord’s voice was cool, and the man had eyes so brown they seemed nearly red. 

Was he so wicked for wanting Wim to live?

“He set her on fire with his hands, sir.”

Wim’s voice was little more than a damning whisper, and Julek thought he might drown for how the man stared at him. 

He wanted to burn those words off of Wim’s traitorous tongue until ash fell from between his teeth. Blackened lips and crumbling skin, he would vomit liquid fire to the floor if Julek stared at him hard enough. It would breathe across the stupid, luxurious rug and eat at the drapes if he could only get it to leave his chest, Wim was supposed to love him. The burning of a Lammas bonfire lighting up his bones until he thought they might melt through his skin, he could feel it in his belly, he could feel it in his blood. 

Wim said he _loved_ him, when his touch pulled muffled cries from his bitten lips, but Wim would never love anything again after Julek got his hands on him.

_Breathe with it, wildling, or it’ll swallow you whole._

A voice not his own sounded between his ears, smooth and cool at the edges. Like holding his breath in the bottom of the washtub without any of the ache in his lungs, it didn’t belong and it wasn’t right and it wasn’t _his_ , but it took up space there now. Rusted eyes stared at him, watched him, knew him. He fought the urge to snarl, swirling embers in his blood that cried out for open-air like his heart did for justice. 

“You should be thankful he cared that you lived, Avanwimbrul. And at such a cost to himself.” That same voice, aloud in the hall rather than in his head but it lapped like gentle waters at the shoreline. There was an insult in there, beautifully bundled up between something like approval and a touch of dog-eared concern like he couldn’t really be bothered. He cared not for Wim and Julek knew it, could feel it, but he watched Julek like he cared plenty. 

“What is your name, child?”

“Julek, si-”

“His name is Kailefyr. He’s always been difficult.”

A rattling flinch across his bones, he could feel the smoke in his belly, his throat. Name so rarely used by his Mama unless he had done something particularly dangerous or rude, but the Lord used it like some kind of weapon. The span of a breath, half of a memory with that echo of a flinch in his muscles still, _he will not mourn for a man who licked my tears as he ruined me_ as her voice bounced in the high ceiling of the kitchen. He knew now what he hadn’t understood then, that cold in her expression and the frigid fury in her voice as she stared down his aunt. 

The Lord sat in his high backed chair with a meal that his Mama had made because she had to, because her job was in the kitchens. He stared down his sloped nose at Julek like he was nothing more than a rat that hadn’t been removed yet, a vermin yet to be dealt with and there. There was that snarl. There was a focal for the festering fire of rage within him as his bandaged face contorted into a violent sneer. 

He knew, he _knew_ , and smoke filtered from between his teeth when he spoke.

“Any child of yours would be difficult.”

_Careful, wildling. We won’t be leaving if you burn the Estate down._

Wim had put distance between them, and there were words falling fast from the Lord’s mouth, but Julek paid him no mind. He couldn’t, not when the other man stepped around the table toward him, closed the distance to touch his burned face. Turned it aside as if inspecting the bandages, like the smoke and heat meant nothing. Julek felt his bones shake as he let himself be moved, as the Lord stopped talking. 

Wim looked at him then, or maybe it was that Julek had been turned to look at him instead; rich brown eyes that he had watched roll back and glossy black hair that Julek knew the feel of between his fingers, Wim was the stranger here, not he. Julek hadn’t gone anywhere, hadn’t changed, but Wim had left him behind and turned sour. 

“I wouldn’t provoke him, my Lord, unless you desire to be forged to your own chair.”

“Mage, you cannot expect m-”

“I expect that we’ll be gone within the hour, at most.” He spoke to the Lord but his eyes were for Julek and the angry, tired panic in his lungs, his blood. The hummingbird that had replaced his heart and the way he wanted to scream. There was something kind in the way the man watched him, the still pond soothing of his voice. “Go, say your goodbyes.”

He ran.

There was no running in these halls, certainly never by a servant. They knew better than to act as such, than to bring embarrassment upon the house in such a manner. The Lord knew all, the guards spoke of things they shouldn’t and the walls had ears, Julek knew these things like he knew his eyes were blue. Yet he ran, soft shoes smacking quietly on the floor as he tore out of the great hall and across the Estate. Past faces that he knew and the scullery maids that never talked to him anyway, Julek skidded around the hall and burst into the servants quarters with a gasp. 

There was flour up to her elbows, dark curls piled up on her head and a smudge of something on her cheek. Her head snapped up as the door slammed into the wall but whatever yell she had came out as a burst of air as he crashed into her instead. A sharp _oof_ , she rocked in place before her arms banded around him and she clutched him tight to her chest. Could she feel how hard his heart throbbed in his chest, could she smell the panic on his skin?

_“Mama.”_

Floured fingers in his hair and she held him close like she might lose him, like she feared he would disappear if she loosened her hold but a little. 

“What happened?”

Shuddering breaths, the wrapping across his face scratched and hurt and his uncovered eye ran as he started to cry. The fabric clung as if ready to cut into his abused flesh but he pressed into her embrace all the same. Aching fingers and the bindings there hurt just as sharp, but he fisted the back of her bodice and held tight. As if he could burrow far enough into the shelter of her arms that he couldn’t be pulled away from the safety she offered. 

“Mama, I-I have to go with him, I-”

Her arms tightened, flour and spices smeared across his clothes and she pressed him to her chest like she intended to never let go. He’d grown too tall for such treatment, bent over to press his head beneath her chin but she still treated him like a child wandering in from the rain. 

“Julek, slow down, wha-”

“I’m not...I did something and I ha-have to go with the mage. I can’t stay, I can’t-” Bent over himself until his words were muffled into her collarbones, his skin burned and his bones ached and he couldn’t stop his crying. Sharp stuttering breaths and tears pressed into her warm skin until it grew slick. He didn’t want to let go but he couldn’t stay, not when he might be a risk, not when Wim had turned on him like that. What did he do when he trusted his Mama, but he didn't trust himself? “I have to _go_.”

"No you don't, you don't have to go anyw-"

"I'm afraid that he must, ma'am." Calm words and still waters, his body rocked with a flinch as she clutched him as if he would drown without her. The pressure hurt, bit at his chest and his arm until the flame-licked flesh screamed beneath their bindings. His whimper was muffled against her skin but it felt like a sob where it punched against his ribs. “Lord Pankratz is insisting that I leave you to a Witcher, so it would seem that we are on a far tighter schedule than I anticipated.”

Her heart thundered under his ear, or maybe that was his own, blood pounding wild through his veins as his body hummed with panic. 

“Evard’ll find himself in my fucking oven before he gives my boy to a Witcher.”

Frazzled and bitten with rage, she had never sounded like that before. Like she readied herself to kill a man just for the sake of him, as if she had already resigned herself to such a thing. Surely she couldn’t have even have wanted him at first, not with what he knew now, but she held him just the same. Like he was as precious as he had ever been, and Julek swallowed back his want to cry anew. 

“Mama, I need to go.” How could he sound so steady when he felt like he was going to shake into pieces? “You have to let me go.”

“And you’ll keep him safe? Sir...?”

Her hands hurt where they held him, and her heart must have too from how furiously it beat. 

“Rinivek of Dravograd, ma’am. I will do everything in my power.”

-

He felt flayed open and rubbed raw, as if someone had cut into his burns just to pour salt on the wounds. Hollow and fizzing and angry, he wanted to rend the Estate to the very ground, but he couldn't, wouldn't. Not while his mother was still inside, not when she had to live there. He got to leave, but she had to remain in the mess he'd made of everything.

The rear courtyard let out toward the stables, with flowers that needed tending and a dandelion that never stopped blooming. An unwanted weed in an otherwise carefully manicured landscape, he'd spent years watching countless servants try to pluck it. 

Rinivek stood before him, proud and calm as the world seemed to bubble and bend. Everything crackled around the edges and it was like he breathed in falling stars as the air cleaved in two. Showed him a room like he had never seen, cool stones and flickering blue firelight that ate at the shadows. He could feel it on his skin even through the rift, the electric humming of something that he wanted desperately to embrace. 

"Come along, Julek."

He couldn't be Julek anymore. He wasn't the boy that pulled at his mothers skirts for somewhere to hide, and he couldn't be the teenager that dangled upside down from trees and tasted kisses from smiling brown lips. Julek would never live to leave the Estate, Julek would never be anything more than a little half breed bastard who could never get his head out of the clouds. 

"Julian."

He wanted to live, so Julek couldn't.

Rinivek watched him for a moment with rust warm eyes and an expression he couldn't decipher before he nodded. Something like approval, or maybe just acceptance, but he smiled a small thing like Jule- _Julian_ had done something right.

"Of course, my mistake. Come along, Julian."

He didn't look back when he stepped through, felt the electricity kiss his skin like an embrace and _breathed._

-

“Lift the rock without touching it.”

Julian had never thought himself particularly small, but there was something daunting about this room. Fitted with high arched stone alcoves and no windows to break apart the monotony of the walls, there was cool grey stone no matter where he looked. Unlit sconces hung on every curved arch but the room was illuminated instead by the glowing sunlight that filtered through the glass ceiling. It felt cold, frigid like the windowless box that made up his room, but there were other people here where in his room he had been the only breathing thing. 

Most of the other boys looked just as nervous as he felt, fidgeting behind their tables with a single stone the size of his fist and a flower each. 

Stiff fingered where his bindings had been removed and the skin had gone pale pink and shiny, the bones ached where he pressed them against his thighs. They ached even when he didn’t, taut skin and screaming nerves. Mottled with scars that went white under the slightest tension, difficult to bend even though Rinivek swore to him that that would get better with time. He just needed to be patient, he had plenty of time even though he wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean. 

Lift the rock without touching it, but nothing happened for a single bated breath. Like none of them were sure how to proceed before one of the boys to his left smacked his hands down onto his table to stare at the stone. A furrow between his brows that melded quickly into a furious expression the longer it took for nothing to happen, the veins in his temples visibly pulsing as his jaw clenched. Slowly, the rock wobbled in place like it had been nudged, rocking back and forth for a moment before it lifted itself into the air a hand off the table. 

A heaving chest and a bright, biting grin, the boy looked so proud, and Julian watched with horror as the skin of his face turned wrinkled and sunken. A milk film spread quickly over his dark eyes, and the black of his hair turned peppered and then pale before it began to quickly fall to the floor. The boy screamed, dropping to his knees as if in pain, face pressed into his shaking hands as he heaved. 

“Chaos requires a balance. For everything you take from it, a form of payment must be given in the form of energy. Rience has just exhibited for you why this transaction is so important.”

The man had called himself Stregobor, and he stood at least a full head taller than Julian with space still to spare. He watched the room with cool, flat grey eyes and an empty tilt to his mouth, gaze pausing on every one of them as if to weigh them. They must have been lacking, they must have been _something_ , because the man made no motion toward any of them and instead raised a hand toward Rience where he had huddled in on himself on the floor. 

He took up the flower on the table before him, and it wilted to a colorless husk as the boys sniffling ceased. 

“You must give something in exchange for everything you do.” He accessed the room with a long, sweeping glance that left Julian feeling cold in its wake. “Lift the rock without touching it.”

The same simple command, but every boy took up his flower in his fist. Julian turned instead, caught one aching hand at Rience’s arm when the boy reached out for the table. A smooth face, a scar along his cheek possibly from a fight, he looked just as startled as Julian felt but he took the assistance to his feet. Watched him with wide, dark eyes that caught at the scars on his face for a moment before snatching up his own flower. 

The last to give his attention to his table and Julian took a slow breath to try and wash out his embarrassment, fingertips pinching gently at the flower stem. 

Nothing happened. 

He stared at the rock on the table and nothing happened except for the bright, panicked bubbling in his chest like he was going to laugh. 

The rock didn’t rattle, it didn’t shift nor did its shadow flicker, and Julian clenched his jaw despite the ache in his skin. The rock didn’t move, the flower didn’t wilt or wither, not a single petal fell out of place as absolutely nothing happened. As the warm skinned, pale-eyed boy across the circle accomplished the task effortlessly. His rock lifted gracefully to eye level and his flower falling limp across his knuckles, a look of careful concentration on his face. 

“Well done, Istredd.”

Praise was given freely, a hand touched to the boy’s shoulder and Julian felt something in his chest twist at the sight. 

There was a sharp gasp to his right, fair-haired and long-faced and he didn’t know the boy’s name. He didn’t want to know his name even if he didn’t want to be alone like he had never been before in his life. Head turned to see what else had gone wrong, but the nameless boy stared at him like he had done something. Like he was the problem yet again.

The room went silent around them. 

Heart in his throat and he looked back at the flower caught between his fingers. The soft petals had been bleached of their weathered blue color, an unnatural white left behind before that too disappeared. The petals didn’t curl into themselves for there was nowhere to curl when they fell apart like that, a spill of something reminiscent to ash sifting through his fingers to fall to the table. In its place, his rock hovered at eye level, its facade bubbling as if it had been replaced with the surface of a boiling pot. Undulations in the stone where it should have been solid, should have been steady, and Julian could only stare. 

Thin tendrils of frost spilled from its surface as it gurgled and shook in place. The cold seeped from it, made his breath visible in a puffed little cloud where it touched at his nose and cheeks. It bubbled faster before a sharp splitting sound emitted from it and the stone burst. His arms came up to protect his face, turning away as it broke into quick flying pieces that scattered to the walls and floor. 

Several of the other boys cried out, curses ringing through the air. 

There were glistering patches of ice wherever the chunks had hit, splatters of it across the cool stone that let off wafts of frost.

Heart thundering in his chest, Julian lowered his arms to find them free of the cold, several of the other boys having done the same to protect themselves. What tension had befallen them with their concentration had fled, a soft murmur of startled laughter filling the space as a few of them righted their stations. 

His smile died on his lips, Stregobor stared at him with flat, cool eyes from across the room. 

-

A plate clattered down onto the table opposite him and Julian startled, lost his grip on his fork. It was joined by a tankard of water, by a body, and he swallowed his chunk of roasted potato when he should have chewed it longer. Caught in his throat where he refused to cough, he swallowed convulsively instead as he watched the other boy get comfortable on the bench, the refectory loud around them. Five days in and someone decided to sit with the strange elf boy with the scars, he’d never exactly been a stranger to company before. 

Things were different when one wasn’t surrounded by their own kind, he had never felt lonely like this in a crowded room. 

He picked up his fork again with deliberate care, body hurting like it hadn’t that morning. Hungry like he didn’t think he had ever been before and he speared another potato, chewed it to try and abate the yawn from the gnawing chasm in his belly. Easier to chew that to try to talk, food between his teeth when he found he didn’t quite remember what words to use to talk like he used too to Daphe and -

“I don’t know how much of that you intended to do, but that was brilliant.”

Pride swelled up like bubbles in his throat, tangled with a bashful tilt of embarrassment until a flush stole over his cheeks. Mottled across his skin and his right ear where the burned tissue hadn’t taken the ability from him, Julian chewed a little slower. Couldn’t help the way he stared at the other boy, the tension that raced through his limbs as he tried not to flinch away. Tried to figure out if he needed to turn tail and run. 

This was _his_ table, he was the one that had been approached, the same rules from the Estate surely applied and he wasn’t the one that had to leave if there was a problem. 

He wasn’t a servant here, even if Julian had to repeat those words like a mantra in the frantic spill of his thoughts. 

“I wasn’t paying attention.”

Soft admittance around a mouthful of food but it seemed like the right thing to say, the other boy’s pale eyes blowing wide. Istredd, he had been called Istredd, praised for lifting a stone and making it look easy whereas Julian had accidentally created a weapon from his own. 

Istredd grinned and tucked into his own plate like Julian had done something right for once in the last two weeks. Someone who had approached just as much as he was someone who hadn’t run away and Julian wanted to lean into him, gorge himself on the phenomenon of someone talking to him when he hadn’t had to start first. It was starting over when he hadn’t ever had to really start in the first place, the people that used to be his friends had just been there one day like they had been there every day, the daughter of the stablemaster and the son of the blacksmith. He’d never been alone before until suddenly it was all that he had. 

“ _That_ is absolutely brilliant, that is. Julian, wasn’t it?” Quick spoken as he grasped his tankard one-handed, took a drink like he hadn’t rocked the boat of isolation that Julian had shored himself on since the Alp, since the fire. “If that’s the sort of thing that happens when you don’t pay attention? They always say its the quiet ones.”

Smile hidden behind his own tankard and Julian held it with both hands, fingers stiff like they hadn’t been that morning. Cool water chased away the lingering taste of herbs and he pressed his nose to the metal.

“You made it look easy.”

Voice rough from disuse and he almost didn’t recognize himself. None of the lilting, costal wavebreak chatter that used to burst from his lungs, he hadn’t laughed since the fire. He hadn’t sang in just as long, confined to a room without windows and his own shadow for company when Rinivek didn’t check in on him. He wasn’t built for lonely, but he had gotten so used to the feel of it that talking felt strange now. 

Istredd tore a piece of chicken from the thigh on his plate with a laugh, quiet and private and formed around smiling teeth. 

“I thought I was going to shit myself.”

Spoken plainly, like some sort of woe begotten fool and Julian couldn’t help his laughter then. A wild crackle of it that burned deep in his lungs and he grinned, face pulling as his mouth stretched wide and his skin silently screamed with a bright ache. It felt like he’d caught fire all over again, the bonfire fester of too much in his bones until they threatened to bubble and bend. He felt like that stone, roiling insides hidden beneath scarred layers of flesh until nobody knew any better, and Julian took another drink. 

Leaned into the way that Istredd talked to him like it was easy. 

“You think I’m jo-”

“So, _that_ was bullshit.”

A shoulder clacked into his, sent a new burst of pain across his arm and chest but Julian rocked with the sudden pressure. Another body pressed against his from shoulder to elbow to hip, the hot, full contact line of a thigh against his own and his wide eyes wheeled around to find the other newcomer. Black eyes and a cutting scar from the point of his brow to the apple of his cheek, he looked better without the husk of a chaotic consequence leeching his years off of him from the inside. He looked _normal_ , just another teenage boy in a castle where they didn’t belong, and he watched as Rience reached over and stabbed one of the potatoes off of _his_ plate. 

“Why didn’t that asshole tell us this might be dangerous?”

There were two of them suddenly, Istredd across the table from him casually mentioning how he had nearly soiled himself and Rience gobbling up his personal space like it didn’t exist. Two of them where he had been alone since the portal, since the fire, since everything had gone up in smoke in the Southern Orchard and Julian couldn’t catch his breath to scream. It was like he’d forgotten what hands felt like, what laughter was, and the two of them crowded in on him until he couldn’t force himself to be alone. 

Tankard waving slightly like an extension of his arm and Istredd winced a bit, offered Julian half of his bread like that made up for the abrupt thievery of his potatoes. 

“That asshole is my sponsor.”

A foot knocked against his, feet stamping one-two beneath the table and he latched onto that chunk of bread with one hand. Brought his forearm down between their plates like some kind of shield for the fire-blackened chicken he hadn’t touched. It smelled like burning if he closed his eyes and Rience stabbed his fork into it like Julian _hadn’t_ tried to at least pretend to protect it. 

“Yeah, well he’s a fuckin’ asshole that let my face turn into a Nan’s cunt.”

Chicken gone as Istredd sighed and Rience scowled, picked up his own plate to dump all of his potatoes in the space where Julian’s stolen meat had been. Quick, seamless transfer even if he hadn’t had to do anything, and he watched as Rience brandished that skewered thigh at Istredd like some sort of weapon. 

“You see a lot of those?”

“Oh, absolutely, gots Nan’s just linin’ up in Assengard.”

“Right, right. Nazair got a good market for that?”

“Istredd, yeah? Six crowns standard, ten if they ain’t got teeth. You lookin’ to invest?”

He choked on a potato, lodged somewhere in his throat as he struggled to breathe and to laugh and to swallow all at once. Rience hit him on the back with a balled fist and a toothy grin as Istredd rocked back harshly on his side of the bench with a roaring laugh. 

-

For the weeks that they had been here, he had never explored this part of the castle, not really. 

Rinivek’s office and personal quarters were at the third level of the Eastern wing, the path easy to remember. A right at the top of the stairs, all the way down the corridor until the last room on the end. Heavy wooden door hinged into the stone that let out into his solar, the front room that served as a personal library that Julian had pilfered through with the older man’s permission and his private chambers that lay beyond.

He knew Rinivek’s space, a refuge where his questions were answered with either well-meant advice or laughter. This hall didn’t compare, the corridor to the left rather than the right before down a second hall. The door halfway down, the room was stone encased whereas Rinivek’s had windows that overlooked the Blue Mountains. There must have been windows further in, tucked away in his private quarters where Julian couldn’t see. 

Filled with books and arcane devices, oversized alembics and bubbling retorts until the air held a sharp, bitter fizz to it. Tinged with vapors that it ached to breathe, but the door had opened when he had knocked. Such a heat in this room but it felt cold, flickering splashes of light from the blue fire that danced on every candle. He had seen such instruments in the alchemy lab set into the basement of the castle, but he hadn’t seen things in such a size before. The alembics towered above him in height, he wouldn’t have been able to clasp his hands around the full-bellied retorts, everything felt larger than life where it shouldn’t have even fit in this room. 

“You requested me, sir?”

The door had shut just as quickly as it had opened, a heavy sound of solid wood against thick stone. The man sat at his desk with a straight back and averted gaze, invested instead in whatever text lay before him. He had only ever seen him for a few of their lessons, but Stregobor felt even more intimidating here like he hadn’t in that round room. Like his presence had taken all of the warmth out of the walls and the fire and Julian itched to turn and flee. 

He stood still instead, watched as a page turned and the silence settled on them.

It sank into his bones, fed that itch until his body burned with it, until something fretful and feral in the back of his skull screamed at a danger he couldn’t perceive. 

“Julian, wasn’t it?”

“Yes sir.”

Sharp words for all that he seemed bored, and Julian swallowed every biting question he couldn’t voice. 

“Do you know what we do at this school, Julian?”

Brow furrowing, shoulders rounded softly and he hesitated. He knew his lessons, he knew the way that he had only just gotten his stone to lift gently rather than turning into a ricocheting weapon in every direction. He knew that there were over a dozen of them, and that they were to be sent to court once they were deemed good enough. He knew that he had been given a second chance to prove himself, that he had a gift that gave him the option to be more than he couldn’t have ever been. 

What answer did he want though?

“You train young men to use their connection with Chaos to assist the world.”

The words felt rehearsed and wrong for all that they tripped off his tongue. He would need to work on that, they had to be a better way to phrase that they didn’t feel so strange to chew. It seemed to be enough though, for Stregobor gave a faint hum. Set a clean quill between the pages and closed his book, turned flat eyes onto Julian instead. 

“Well done. Ban Ard is home to greatness. Here, we take young men and make them into the best versions of themselves. They are meant for court, for war councils, for salvation. We do everything we can for the sake of humanity.”

Cold, empty words from a smiling mouth. The expression didn’t reach his eyes, didn’t catch at the corners or add any of the right inflection to his voice. He sounded flat, hollow where there should have been _something_ there instead. Stregobor spoke as if he believed himself, and who was Julian to disagree with a man like him?

“But you aren’t a man, are you?”

“Sir?”

There was something about that smile, the way it sat on the man's face that made his blood run like midwinter sludge through his veins.

Stregobor watched him like the vampire had, a blistering hunger that he instantly recognized and hated all at once, and Julian had never felt quite so small. Chair pushed back with a quiet creak of wood on stone and the sorcerer tipped his head aside, eyes cool and dark as he stared. 

“An elf in these halls, Kailefyr? Do you think any court will ever take you as you are? Any council?”

“I-”

“I shouldn’t be the only one doubling down on their efforts to keep you out of the mud.” Placid expression and that same fulsome, smooth smile, Stregobor held his gaze as his feet shifted, as his knees spread. “Kneel.”

Heart bound tight in his chest and Julian fought to breathe, felt the tremble start in his core. Ice through his lungs that spread like a disease until his body burned with it. A single, simple command, but the weight behind it was staggering, the implications and the bright, sudden clarity of it all thrust upon him. He reeled with it, couldn’t find his breath or feel his hands, and Stregobor watched him with those cruel, empty eyes as he struggled. 

As he took a step forward only to fall to his knees on the cold stone between spread thighs. 

“Good. Open.”

A cool hand on his jaw, a thumb pressed and pulled at his lower lip until his mouth went slack. Vision filling and blurring quick with burning tears but he did as told, mouth open despite the roiling sea of nausea and loathing that flooded his gut. Those fingers pulled at the still soft hinge of his jaw, forced it lower, wider, while that thumb dug against the soft pink of his tongue. Pressed at it until the muscle yielded, until he stared with too blue eyes and a waiting mouth. 

“Perfect.”

-

“Did you do the assigned reading?”

“There was assigned reading?”

Silence for a moment, the two boys staring at one another over the table in the library. Istredd was occupied with his ruins and his journals in a cave where they didn’t bother to follow, Rience for his boredom and Julian for the way it made him tremble to see so many bones from his ancestors in one place. It was just the two of them instead, Rience with an almost stricken expression on his face and Julian incapable of not frowning. 

The tome on Continental Politics and Trade lay heavy in the bottom of the satchel he’d taken to carrying around, and he fished it out with a huff. 

Slapped it down on the table and watched a little billow of dust puff up into the air. 

“Chapters five through eight.”

“Melitele’s sweet perfumed thighs.”

-

They had been given cushions to sit upon, pillows oversized and overstuffed like a luxury he had never known before. Julian had wanted to clutch his tight to his chest with a childlike yearning but refrained if only to stave off any further embarrassment. He had clasped his hands behind him instead, carefully bent fingers and a fraction less of the pain. It hurt less every day, became more of an ache with every methodical reapplication of his bandages. 

He had been told that they would go numb like his face had, and that he was lucky. 

He didn’t feel lucky.

“Get comfortable, you’re all going to be here for the next few hours.”

Legs crossed and his hands curled loosely in his lap, Julian caught Istredd’s wide, curious expression and the way Rience’s face crumpled on a muffled sneeze. Devran sat across from him, just as long-faced as he had been in the round room a few days before. Quiet and drawn like the last place he wanted to be was on a cushion within arms reach of Julian. He sat all the same, every one of them settling in two rows on the floor. 

Watchful, fingers tangling together between his thighs, there was no mistaking the way that Devran shuffled his cushion further back on the floor. 

“As a conduit of chaos, the most powerful tool you have at your disposal is your mind. Every thought, every memory, every emotion has power to it. What you do with that tool is paramount.”

Where Stregobor had demanded their attention with an embittered ultimatum like they either had to listen to him or be left behind, Rinivek captivated the room. Elegantly spoken with his voice calm and clear, he stayed in constant motion where Stregobor had seemed rooted in place. His words rolled across them as he went, gentle and steady like he had all the time in the world just to teach them this single lesson. 

“Your mind is the most powerful tool you possess. Today, you will learn to use that tool as a looking glass to see into anothers mind. Your peer across from you will be your partner for this exercise.”

Devran looked ready to either weep or flee, a tight, wild look in his eyes like he had been caged to the floor. So wound up over the thought of Julian having access to his thoughts that he would rather run from the exercise altogether. 

He wasn’t sure what he had done to garner such a response, but it burned all the same. Like the flames in the Southern Orchard, a flashbang of shame through his blood when he had done nothing but sit like he had been told. Maybe it was his scars, the mottle of them across his skin and the way that they had taken his hands and half of his smile. The burns had settled down and he knew them to be horrible but he hadn’t thought them so unsightly to cause such fear. Or the display from the tower room the week prior, his absentminded use of power so fierce that his stone had exploded in a shower of ice across the room. 

How was he supposed to read into someone who looked ready to fall to pieces?

“You have to want to see. By the end, this will be as easy as opening a book. Begin.”

Devran had a thin splatter of freckles across his face and pale brown lashes that angled down rather than curling upwards. Hazel-green eyes, a thin mouth, he watched Julian with a frightened throb from the vein at his temple. Like he was going to hurt him, like he wanted to. With how ready the taller boy seemed to put distance between them, it would have been a struggle even if he cared to. 

Devran blinked and Julian stared, and it was like taking cotton out of his ears in a crowded room. 

_“You’ll get us caught!”_

_She giggled like she didn’t care, his words lost on her mouth where she hadn’t stopped kissing him. He wasn’t any better for all that he scolded, hands catching at the budding swell of her hips and wrinkling her deep blue skirt. There would be soot marks there, evidence of the forge when she shouldn’t have stepped through the door. She wouldn’t be able to scrub at the fabric enough to get rid of it without a wash, but he clutched her tighter, closer._

_Licked between her lips and tasted the way she laughed, caught between his body and the wall of the forge._

_“I guess you’ll just have to keep quiet then.”_

_“You’re a menace.”_

_Spoken lovingly against her mouth as she tangled her fingers in his hair, thin thighs parted to make room for his own. She arched into him, pressed up against his chest for another taste of his tongue. Her nails scraping across his scalp sent a heated shiver racing up his spine, and he held at her waist in a familiar hold. The hand against his abdomen had other ideas, enough pressure to make him stumble half a step back and his breath caught in his chest._

_Gusted against the top of her dark head when she gathered up her skirts and fell to her knees._

_“Madja!”_

_Nimble fingers at the ties of his breeches and she pulled at his smalls, pale gaze bright and upturned._

_“Hush, Devran. You don’t want to get us caught, do you?”_

The room had gone hot, or maybe he had, an electric warmth crackling across his nerves as he breathed. Fever bright glaze on the thin face across from him, tight clenched fists as the boy blinked sluggishly. 

_“Madja!”_

_A running stride to catch up, to keep up, half the village between them but he knew her anywhere. Dark hair half undone from its thick braid and frazzled, she didn’t stop or turn at the sound of her name. Instead it was like she sped up, a fist caught in her sunset skirt so she could run. Away from him rather than toward him, and his heart hurt in his chest as he threw himself after her. Splashed in the mud and pressed into a sprint to catch up with her, just barely missing her hand as she slipped around a corner behind a house._

_He caught her shoulder instead, and her hands came up to shield her face as he pressed her into the cool stone. Like she feared him, thought he would strike her and Devran recoiled like he’d been burned. Felt some wounded sound in his chest and his fingers hesitated to touch her, gentle on her wrists as he pulled her hands away. Sifted her hair away from her pale face so he could see her and the way she turned her cheek, shied away from him._

_Purple fingerprints around the thin column of her throat, a bloom of it around her pale brown eye that made the color stand out in a sickly fashion. Crusted blood on his thumb from the split of her lip as she tried to turn away from him, pressed into him._

_“Who fu-”_

_Wet eyed and trembling, she clutched at him like she hadn’t just tried to outrun him._

_“Don’t.”_

A hand on his shoulder brought the room back into focus with a burst of sound and sensation.

His bones ached, legs gone to ground like they meant to sleep for the entire winter while the rest of him felt coiled tight. Held at the ready, he swayed into that touch as soon as he breathed out, tension cut and his balance gone with it. Chills across his skin where that lightning promise of warmth had fizzled out, trembles overtook him instead and Julian heaved in a sharp breath. Another even as his chest burned. 

Ynsis and Vida had pulled Devran off his cushion, one of them supporting him while the other had thrust a bucket under his hung head. The boy wretched and gagged like his very organs were trying to expel themselves, broken sobbing sounds bracketing every wet _splat_ into the bucket. 

“Breathe through it, wildling.”

Rinivek with a hand upon him, soothing and steady where he felt like he could fall apart. Hollowed out like something had been taken from him, like he had left something behind somewhere that he shouldn’t have been. Julian took a shuddering breath and turned his face into the cool cotton of his breeches, eyes clenched tight. 

“Breathe.”

-

“They’re saying you split his mind in half.”

“Can we not talk about this?”

“But did you?”

_“Rience!”_

Quill stabbed into the tabletop and the tip snapped off, half buried and bleeding ink onto the wood. It stained his hands almost immediately, black across silvery pink scar tissue until it would take hours of scrubbing to get it to come away. He looked the part of the scholar now, adolescent like he didn’t feel anymore and clumsy where he had never been. 

There were no more orange trees and there was no more costal sunsets, only his studies and his friends and commands that he didn’t want to follow spoken from a void wrapped in flesh. 

Sharp black eyes and both hands held up in surrender, Rience left it alone even though Julian knew better. Over half a year spent in one anothers company and they knew each other by now, like how Rience remained wholly incapable of leaving things well enough alone and how Istredd was distracted at the best of times. A bit of a peace offering in how another quill was offered up from his own stash and Julian took it with quick fingers, pressed it into the ink well to try and resume his writing. 

“You can’t just _ask_ things like that.”

“Oh, that’s real rich, I ain’t allowed questions now?”

“That isn’t what I meant and you know it.”

Istredd took over for him, verbal sparing with Rience still the easiest way to distract him until he lost the original thread of just what he’d wanted. Better the other boy than him, an apology if ever he would really get one and Julian went back to his translation notes. Elder came easily, quicker than Common ever would but there were still assignments that needed transcribed if he wanted to receive his marks. If he wanted to be able to help the boy that strove to be the very bane of his existence, but at least Rience meant well. 

Their argument flowed above his head, feet tangled together beneath the table as he paused on a line that didn’t make sense. That hadn’t been crossed over properly the first time, and Julian muttered a quiet, grumbling curse to himself as he carefully crossed out the line in the book and made the correction in the margins. The meaning had all but been lost, and he frowned at the jumbled words that tasted like ash when he mouthed them to himself. No, that wouldn’t do, like someone from Nilfgaard had tried to rework the text only to add their own cultural connotation to it. 

Where was the honor, the penance given to the original art?

“-ask anything, tucked up in your fuckin’ cave all day like-”

“My _studies_ are my own business.”

Furious chattering between them, and his own tongue got away from him as the two argued. 

“You attend your studies like most men do a sodden cunt.”

It took a moment for him to recognize the silence that had taken their table, a stricken hush that had him lifting his head. Squinting at the both of them where they stared, Rience slack jawed and Istredd flushed beneath his warm brown skin. Istredd, who’s jaw shut with a _click_ of his teeth, who’s pale gaze averted quickly like he could will himself somewhere else entirely. 

“ _Is_ there a sodden cunt?”

A cat like, crackling sound from his throat and Istredd stared at him almost out of spite. A refusal to acknowledge Rience where he had started to grin that manic, gutter rat grin of his like he had found another hallucinogenic stash tucked away. 

The damage was already done, the amount of eye contact he did or didn’t make didn’t matter at this point. 

“Istredd, _is_ there a cunt?”

“ _Julian_ , she has a _name_.”

A crowing sputter of laughter, Rience rocked wildly in his chair and would have fallen had neither of them caught a foot against the wooden legs. Force of habit even if it would have done him some good to splay on his back for a bit, might have taught him some humility where they hadn’t managed to yet. He went ignored otherwise, crackling laughter mostly tuned out for how Julian stared at Istredd instead. Watched the way embarrassment colored his sharp features as he realized his mistake, dropped his face down into his hands. 

“You never gave it to us.”

“Melitele’s sagging tits.” A reverberating groan as he slouched in his chair, forced up their feet until Julian had to rearrange his while Rience swayed dangerously in his chair. Hands dragging across his face and he swore, scrubbed at his cheeks and eyes until it had to hurt. “Why are you like this?”

A shrug, bright eyed and mouth twisted into the best kind of smile he could manage anymore with how the scar tissue fought and pulled, stiff. 

“Yennefer of Vengerberg.”

“And she’s good for you?”

Spoken over the way that Rience mouthed the word Vengerberg like it was some kind of joke only he understood. Julian pulled his quill back before it could bloom ink across the book, another stain on his hands nothing compared to that kind of accidental vandalism. 

“She’s brilliant and brutal.”

A dream like quality that had Istredd sighing, slouch taking on a more relaxed splay even as Julian grinned. 

“Good luck, mate.”

“ _Vengerberg_.”

Moment lost almost immediately, Istredd sighed in tandem with him for all that their third just snickered in his seat. Dark eyes turned skyward and his head tipped back, both hands folded behind his neck in a cradling support. They must have shared an idea, feet pulled away so the chair overbalanced, so Rience clattered to the ground with a yelp that echoed through the library. A few heads turned their way, curiosity before they noticed Julian, before they made themselves scarce again almost out of fear.

He hadn’t seen Devran since the week prior, and he wondered even if he refused to ask. 

“Really, Rience?”

“What!”

-

“Good boy.”

A hand fisted in his hair, full weight pressed down on him until he couldn’t struggle like he wanted to. Head turned aside and his face smashed onto the cool surface of the desk, bare skin sweat slicked and chilled in the cold air. Short bitten nails dug into the unforgiving wood, matched the bruising snap of it against his thin hips where his body had been forced to bend and take. There would be blood when he was finally allowed to stand, there would be splinters along his abdomen that he would have to pluck free and fresh blood pooled beneath thin skin. 

Evidence of where he had been and what had been done, but there were never marks left where anyone would see them. 

Tears across his face that had puddled at his temple, snot run from his nose for how he had sobbed. The desk had gone sticky and he would be made to lick it clean just like last time, he knew exactly how this went after so many times. 

Feet kicked wide apart and a rough, weathered hand pulled at one cheek, held his body open so Stregobor could watch where he had split his body open. He hadn’t been ready, but he was never ready. He hadn’t wanted it, but that didn’t change anything, hadn’t mattered the first time and it didn’t matter now. Body pinned to a desk and forced open around a cock that battered his insides without a care for how his feet had once kicked or how he had once clawed, he had learned. Had gone as pliant as he could beneath the pressure, tried to breathe through it while his mind fought to fizzle and fuzz and snap out of place. 

“What do we say, Julian?”

A shift in how he stood, the slightest change in angle and that cock speared across a swollen bundle of nerves deep inside. Lit him up with a lightning static crackle through his veins that had him sobbing, moaning even as he cried. Writhed against the pressure and the sporadic bursts of pleasure that he didn’t want. As his own body betrayed him and he spasmed around the man’s cock, fucked himself back on it even as he just wanted it to stop. 

_“Pluh-please!”_

That hand around his throat, body pulled up until he stood at an arch, cock buried inside him as his body clenched and dribbled precum to match the pearly puddle on the floor. Stregobor collapsed back into his chair and took Julian with him, splayed wide on his lap with that hand viced across his windpipe. The other on his hip, grip like a brand that would leave even more marks as the man forced his body to grind against the intrusion. 

“Good boy. Fuck yourself for me.”

A bubbling, moaning sob as shame raced hot through him, as his head swam, as he _did._

-

“Are we supposed to be here?”

A scoff, bitten off behind a honey cake that he hadn’t paid for and shouldn’t be eating and Rience side-eyed him as they walked. Ate his treasure like he had earned it, another stuffed into Julian’s hands like it was supposed to keep him occupied. It was sticky, oozed honey onto his fingers that he had to lick off lest to get on his clothes. Harder to hide then and he moved with quick feet to keep up as Rience sifted through the crowd like he was a part of it. 

Mumbled quip about boredom that morning had been met with a strange gleam in the other boys dark eyes. His hand had been caught, books left behind and ink well left uncapped, it wasn’t like Istredd was there to keep them out of trouble for once. Off to his ruins with the excuse of studying even though they all knew better, no dust or bones of the dead would leave those kinds of marks on his skin or that look in his eyes. They _might_ , but that was a problem for Istredd to sort out, those sorts of preferences and proclivities beyond him when Julian tried to forget his own numerous encounters. 

He’d been pulled to the gardens at the southern bailey, past all the hellebore and verbena and arenaria to the sloping earth. Rience had dragged him _through_ an arched gap in the wall, one of the many views to Ban Ard proper below, and then the descent had begun. Quick into the city where they shouldn’t have been and Julian felt like he could breathe for the first time in days, lost in a crush of bodies and peoples that didn’t know him. A pilfered cap stuffed onto his head to shield his ears from the same early morning chill that had made his fingers ache, it was like the other boy had thought of everything. 

He hadn’t thought of Julian’s strange relationship with guilt, but that wasn’t here nor his problem, and Julian would take what he could get. 

"Eat your honey cake before I give it back."

A quick bite almost out of spite, sweet, soppy dough on his tongue that tried to stick to his teeth. Julian chewed and turned the roll so the cavern his teeth had created faced the sky rather than tipped sideways. Less likely to run then, less honey to have to clean off his hands. If he licked a sugared path up the face of the roll then, well, that was his decision. 

"You can't take it back, you _stole_ it."

Squatters rights meant something for property, vaguely, surely the same went for food? It'd been handed to him, he'd bitten and licked it, by all accounts then it now belonged to him. It was _his_ honey cake.

Istredd wasn't there to act as their moral compass, and Rience just grinned that biting, sharp-toothed stretch of his.

"Stole you too, seems t'me that you're stuck with me for the day then."

Muffled laughter around another bite and he knocked their shoulders together. Rience swayed with a crackle of laughter and Julian kept pace with the way the other boy caught his sleeve and pulled. From one part of the market to another, the hot iron burn of lit forges mixing with the smell of fresh bread, strange things made for comfort in equally strange times. 

"So what, we just out and runnin' for the day?"

"Jules, please. _Live a little."_

Nose curling as he licked a line of honey from his thumb and Julian sighed, breathed in woodsmoke, and the leftover wet earthen spill from rain during the night. Like the servants quarters but more, like the way they had all crowded in the small room off of the kitchen for Imbaelk but different. Bigger, broader, more people than he had ever seen in one place and more buildings than he had ever thought could be crowded together. A whole other world existed beyond the Estate, things he had never imagined piled together outside the borders of the only home he had ever known. 

People in the market chattered and shouted amongst themselves, vendors vying for the attention of anyone who would hesitate or listen. Rience had already pulled him away from two stalls with things he didn’t need, glittering rings and shiny baubles that he couldn’t very well buy with coin that he didn’t have. Brilliant dyed fabrics on artfully stitched doublets and cloaks, delicate chemises that were woven so fine they were spun of semi-translucent silk. Rings and bangles and necklaces and hairpins, jeweled combs and circlets of braided supple leather or gleaming metal. Things he wanted with honey sticky fingers that itched to trail over items he couldn’t touch, but he wanted them like a greedy little magpie. 

Live a little, and he hesitated at those glistering, shiny metal baubles and glimmering bangles that would look so pretty on his fingers and wrists. Licked at his honey cake before taking another nibbling bite, a tug at the sleeve of his tunic pulling him out of the way of a quick burst of children where they spilled out of a thin alley. Urchins by the dirt on their faces and the ragged hang of their clothes, but their eyes were bright and their hungry mouths split with laughter. Head turning to watch them as they scrambled over themselves after a flea-bitten dog and he clacked into Rience, overbalanced and unprepared and trusting where his friend caught him with a grumble, a swear. 

“You’re the _actual_ worst at this.”

Affection in the crackling sigh puffed against his too-long hair; Rience groused for all that he threw an arm around Julian’s shoulders and kept him close. Bumped their sides together and his thin ribs caught and clicked against the other boys as they moved. As he slid his hips and swayed his shoulders to match the easy breathing summertime swagger that emanated from Rience’s frame. He wanted to mirror that, wanted to borrow that insouciant, unflappable air, and stitch it to the inside of his bones until he lived it too. 

He grinned though, floral honey lush on his tongue and teeth with lips gone sticky and shiny. He wanted to sing like he hadn’t in months, melodies and harmonies and the humming promise of lyrics that he hadn’t let himself give a voice to scraping his throat raw until it ached. The burn of a million things he hadn’t said, the choral build of a thousand chords he hadn’t tried, the diaphragm press of a hundred songs he refused to let himself write. Not since that fire, not since Wim, like some kind of cork had been lodged in his throat so he could find his breath to barely speak even if he couldn’t sing. 

He wanted to sing, he wanted to _try,_ but didn’t know if Rience would listen or laugh. 

Instead, Julian gave a billowing, dramatic sigh as his arms heaved, the rest of his honey cake stuffed into his mouth before he practically swooned against his friend’s chest. 

“Melitele’s powdered arse cheeks, _Julian!_ ” 

Left Rience to catch him with a sharp bitten swear, arms snapped tight around his waist to keep him from falling. Clutched at the cut of his hip and the thin of his waist as he dipped low like a dance he’d never been allowed to follow the rhythm of. Rience watched him with a furrowed brow and thinned eyes, a frown that smoothed into a pinched kind of contemplation. Unfurled into a snaggled, broken glass grin as Rience started to laugh, dropped him a little lower like a threat, a brazen sway that had his head nearly touching the ground. 

Julian laughed like he couldn’t breathe and caught honey sticky fingers on the other boy’s arms, pulled upright with a _snap_ and spun into a quick, filthy step for a dance that he didn’t recognize. 

_“‘s a Nazairi waltz. Dancing ain’t all pretty frippery ‘n shit down there, half the time it’s somethin’ you shouldn’t see in court but it’s got nowhere else to be.”_

_Curious sound met with a curious answer, he gripped and fingered the over plush pillow that’d been handed to him. Like they expected him to need to bite it or some nonsense, and instead he just pawed at it like some kind of cat that couldn’t get comfortable._

_“Thought you would be more proper than that.”_

_“Proper? You’s havin’ a giggle, right?” Braced on his knees on the floor and Rience loomed on his side. Pressed up close like Julian’s scars didn’t bother him, like the point of his ears weren’t something strange to see in these halls. “We ain’t fuckin’ Nilfgaard, nobody has time for all that shi-will you stop fuckin wrigglin? I got’s a needle here, you shite.”_

_Page turned in his book, Istredd lounged on his bed with just part of his legs visible, body turned just so that Julian couldn’t see. Bored, his space invaded and the pillow wouldn’t be returned even if Istredd didn’t know that yet. He disappeared enough times to fuck his Aretuza girl, he wouldn’t notice if Julian decided he wanted the pillow instead. It deserved a better home, someone that’d be there more often._

_Gaze cut aside as far as he could and he could only see half of Rience’s face, distorted by unbrushed dark hair and the way his vision fizzed now in that eye._

_“It’s my ear, I know the needles there.”_

_“Why are you piercing his ear again?”_

_Disapproving little gurgle and Rience pulled at his earlobe, scar tissue and deadened nerves that only found pressure where there maybe should have been pain. Pulled down and clasped the slice of potato to the back of it, had sworn up and down that it made a difference._

_“Didn’t pinch a dangly bauble for myself, gold ain’t really my color. So, little Jules is gettin’ his ear stabbed for his nameday so the thing don’t go t’waste.”_

_“It’s your nameday?”_

_The book snapped shut, he barely felt the needle as it pierced through the scar tissue and into the potato slice and Rience sighed against the top of his head._

_“Really, Istredd?”_

-

“Mandrake, highly toxic and poisonous to the surrounding soil but it’s used in multiple potions and tinctures. The secretion from the roots has powerful hallucinogenic properties.”

Rust warm eyes crinkled at the edges and Rinivek nodded, a soft hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth as he exchanged the jar for another. 

“Sewant mushroom, a common fungus found in sewers and moist caves. When ground, its fluid acts as a catalyst for other herbs and alchemical mixtures.”

Another jar in a line of many, but it was warm here. Folded up in a chair on the other side of Rinivek’s desk and the man watched him with curious, kind eyes that Julian wasn’t sure how to meet. He felt wrong-footed now no matter how he stepped, like breathing too hard would break the delicate barbed wire lacings he used to hold himself together. Rinivek didn’t know, and he didn’t ask, but what was Julian supposed to do when he wasn’t sure he could trust himself?

Sat on the other side of the man’s desk for a standard lesson and it felt like he’d become a shadow in his own skin. He wouldn’t be hurt here, Rinivek listened to every concern and complaint he ever gave and answered slowly, thoughtfully. Like Julian deserved every ounce of careful, educated attentiveness he could offer. And that meant something, it did, even if he wasn’t sure how to explain it, what to say or how to thank him.

If he should thank him, if it would be welcomed and acknowledged or if it would only spur questions he didn’t know how to answer.

A rippling, stone dark mound of flesh had been fitted down into the jar, magma bright veins cut through it. Stuffed in tight until it bubbled onto itself, the top painstakingly sealed as a last line of defence to keep the organ trapped inside. He knew what it was by texture and color, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. Not when he could practically smell the stench of it even through the thick glass.

“Cockatrice stomach, the digestive oils are difficult to extract and a useful binding agent. Due to its potency, it’s highly sought after by potion makers, but harvesting is dangerous and therefore expensive.”

Nothing rhymed with cockatrice that he could think of, but there was the promise of a melody in the back of his throat. Rinivek smiled at him though, warm and pleased and easy like he’d done something right for what felt like the first time in days. 

“You’ve gotten much better at that. Still worried about Argim’s apothecary exam?”

He had never had a father, not in the ways that counted. Maxim had been lord of the house and nothing more, a specter that he saw from a distance and had been quick to avoid. Distance put between them to keep himself safe, his mother had always told him to keep to his composure for all that his aunt always told him to keep his head down. The man had never lingered around him, never looked at him twice if he even look at him at all and Julian had reveled in that.

So swept up in not being seen that he hadn’t stopped to think of what he might have been missing. 

A steaming mug of mulled cider slid across the desk with a silent burst of Chaos that he could feel in his bones and the way that Rinivek smiled at watched him over his own. 

Rinivek looked at him like a father should, like he loved him, and all he had to do was say something. He could trust him, he could tell him, Rinivek would listen, Rinivek would _help_. 

“Could we do a few more?”

Laughter bubbled into his cup as rust warm eyes crinkled at the corners and Julian didn’t feel the smile that painted across his mouth. It felt real for all that it felt like a cast, a falsism of what it was supposed to be. Good enough to pass even though he wanted to scream and cry, wanted Rinivek to just listen, to _ask_. But he couldn't find the words, how was he supposed to ask for help when he couldn't even think to help himself?

His cider tasted like cinnamon and clover and Zerkannian pepper spiced honey and he wondered if he could drown himself with it. 

“Of course we can, wildling.”

Another jar pulled up onto the desk, a smooth stone the size of his fist contained inside it. Flickering shades of reds and yellows, blues and greens all clustered together until they made a kaleidoscope glimmer across the surface. 

“Optima mater, a high-grade explosive used in bombs and acids. Harvested from the stomach of draconids after at least a weeks worth of digestion, their stomach acids work to-”

-

The thunder boomed through the castle, roiling reverberations that seemed ready to shake the very stones apart at their mortar. It had pulled him from his bed, an internal room didn’t save him from the way that the sky roared its grievances like it planned to crash down on them. The floor rumbled beneath his feet with every step, breeches hastily laced and his tunic fighting to pinch at his shoulders, he’d grown like a weed in the last few weeks. His shoes barely fit anymore, grown too tight in the toes and he’d left them behind in his room when he’d been beckoned out into the hall. 

Sleepy eyed but ever bright, he could see Istredd where the boy had hesitated in his doorway. A few inches taller than his friend now, he could see the top of his head and Julian would have chuckled at the notion if he hadn’t been so tired. 

He wanted to crawl back into his bed, but Master Argim ushered them along with driving steps and a touch to his shoulder. He could see Vida a few paces ahead, riot of burgundy satin curls wild from sleep like he had never seen them, Omel stalking with too wide eyes and shadow bruises beneath them like he hadn’t slept at all. A cluster of them flooded into the hallway and he leaned against Istredd with a crackling yawn.

Jaw popping, a hand to his hip kept him upright and ahead of Master Argim and Timoty as the boy was pulled from his room. 

“Where are we going?”

Spoken around yawn and Istredd squinted at him, looked like he wanted to push his face away and honestly, his breath wasn’t his fault in that instant. Master Argim had barely given him a chance to dress, Ynsis struggling and flailing to outsmart his own shirt a few persons ahead of them. He didn’t push him off, didn’t turn his head, and instead Istredd shrugged, one hand scrubbing hard through his short, tight curls. The other boy looked just as tired as Julian felt, and surely that made it worse. 

“Didn’t say.”

Didn’t say kept them shuffling quickly through the hall, faster than he really wanted to move for all that Istredd wouldn’t let him fall behind. Fumbling feet and the want to lean his whole weight on Istredd as the other boy tried to keep himself upright, as the castle quivered and quaked all around them with another harsh clatter of thunder. He would have thought it an invasion of some type in Ban Ard hadn’t been so heavily fortified. Instead, the storm raged upon them seemingly with the intent to drive them into the very ground beneath the rubble of the castle, and Julian wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed.

But he was curious, quickly spilling into the stage of being bright eyed, and too awake to return to the warm clutch of his covers. 

Brow furrowing as they rounded a corner, as they were ushered up a flight of stairs that he had never seen previously. 

“Where’s Rience?”

No dark eyes or sharp tongue, he twisted around as best he could but it was impossible to safely manuver in such away. The stairs too steep, too curved, his bare feet nearly slipped on the stone and Julian only stayed upright because of the way Istredd grasped his arm. The golden, dangling baubles pierced through his ear jangled quietly with the motion.

“Haven’t seen him since the last lesson.”

Two days then, two days that Istredd had been put up with his Aretuza girl even if something wasn’t quite right there and two days that Julian had been buried in books in Rinivek’s office. 

They hadn’t seen or heard from the last part of their trio in two days, and something inside struck cold low in his belly, clenched. 

“Isn’t tha-”

An open arch at the top of the stairs that let out into the night, a stone lip connecting the arcade of piers and columns until only the hollow at the highest point remained. The unadulterated view of the sky showed the ripples of the storm far above them, the air rife with the crackle of ozone that threatened to spark when he breathed. They were all pressed to those supports, just beneath that stone lip when a burst of lightning shot down through the opening high above. It snapped to the stone beneath where it danced and sparked for an instant of blinding light and heat before it disappeared once more. 

It was like he had forgotten how to breathe in that instant, spine doing its best to seam to the stone behind him. He could feel the spark of it in his teeth, night vision ruined in the wake of such a bright burst of light and oh. His heart in his throat, a violent throb that he could taste on the back of his tongue, the tidal rush of it swelled and crashed in his ears with such a froth he wanted to gag. The part of him that still felt like that little boy in the kitchen wanted to scream, something terrified and squirming alive and wailing in the back of his brain. He shouldn’t have been up here, he shouldn’t have been this close to something that would surely ruin him, but he felt like a moth to a flame for how desperately he wanted to reach out and touch. 

Offer a hand to the next inevitable strike. 

A glass bottle passed to each of them down the line, Master Argim strong and sure where he walked out from beneath that lip like he didn’t fear the storm. 

“To be able to wield your own Chaos, you have to be able to harness the Chaos around you.” A single eye watched them, a rich green where the other was milky and blinded, bisected by a deep slashing scar from hairline to jaw. Master Argim held out a single hand to the sky, palm offered like it was waiting for another to hold it in kind. He caught the next fierce bolt of lightning instead, the burst of it zapping across his shoulders to arch into the dip of his palm where it held like a flickering ball. His face looked ghoulish in the erratic light, dead eye empty and glazed. “Those of you who can bottle lightning will have proven your right to Ascend.”

Despite the thunder rolling and the static crackle in his palm, a cutting silence fell over them. Collective breath held as none of them knew whether to move forward or not, as the tempered power in his hand dripped out only to take root and disperse against the stone floor. Master Argim left them then, pressed himself just so into the space for the stairs so they couldn’t leave even if they had wanted to. The final test then, the last thing they could learn and the only chance they had to prove themselves and Julian hadn’t felt this out of his depth since the hayloft with Wim, since he’d stumbled through that portal from Kerack. A different flavor to the fear now, but he recognized the feeling for what it was all the same. 

Bertard stepped forward into the clearing, the best with his herbs but the quickest to ignore conversation like they bored him. Julian had never actually spoken to the boy even if Istredd had, and he clutched his bottle like he thought it would shatter in his hand.

Barely managed to lift it away from his chest before a deafening crack of lightning struck and his entire body turned bright with the current. Uncontained, raw power and it scrambled across his flesh with a quick burning smell, with cries of surprise and fear alike from the crowd of them as it consumed him. His body blew into one of the columns, smoke wafting thick off his flesh despite the heavy pouring rain. The overly sweet stench of burnt flesh filled his nose and Julian turned with a gagging heave, Istredd’s fist tangled up in his tunic one of the only things keeping him upright. 

“Sweet Melitele.”

Ynsis descended into prayer, a new kind of terror rampant through their minds so heavy that none of them dared to move. 

This would kill him if he couldn’t contain it, boil him alive like the fire in the Southern Orchard had tried to do. But the fire had failed to snuff him out, the Alp hadn’t managed to devour him, he had grown like a weed in the last few weeks and he refused to be plucked or trodden or forgotten. 

The world hadn’t managed to kill him yet, and he refused to let it try to now. 

Bottle tight in his hand and he launched himself away from the safety of the pillar, away from Istredd where his friend shouted his name. Out into the bitter cold autumn rain with the glass held high and a hymn, a prayer and a plea in his mother’s tongue ricocheting through his brain. 

The lightning struck with a blinding burst of heat that centered in his palm, numbed his fingers even as the rest of his body felt alive for the first time in forever. Heart thundering in his chest and his blood singing, he tasted the power of it on his tongue and felt it in the marrow deep within his bones. Nothing could have contained his laughter then, no fear or any pain for all that he felt none, body raw in the sweetest of ways. As he fed into the feeling and embraced it where it held him in turn, kinship and comfort like he had never known as fleeting as it was consuming.

The warmth gone just as quickly as it had come, a beacon of light carefully contained between thin walls of glass and he slammed the cork into the bottles mouth. 

Watched the tendrils of smoke dance from his skin and laughed into the biting rain as the sky rumbled overhead once more.

-

He couldn't find Rience anywhere in the castle, and no amount of questioning got him anywhere. 

A lie in the space between breaths, he had been taught that there was never a question without an answer, that he simply had to know where to look. But he didn't know where to start, and the direct approach gained him no ground. Cold eyes and false smiles, redirections on if he had been approached about Ascending yet. He would have asked Rinivek if the man had been there, but he had been summoned to court in Pont Vanis to deal with an affair that felt inconsequential in the wake of Rience's disappearance.

People didn't just vanish, but nobody had anything to give him.

Devran hadn't returned to them after the mind-reading session, Bertard hadn't survived the lightning, but there at least he knew. He could guess, he could assume. Here, with Rience, Julian had nothing to start from, no foundation to base his search. Like the boy had gone up in smoke and he struggled with the urge to scream.

His path to the refectory was cut short by a quick clamped grip to his bicep, yanked around on his heels until he crashed full body into the other person. A surge of panic and his heart leapt to the back of his mouth, heavy on his tongue as he felt a feral swell of power pool between his ribs. Fire in his fingers, the promise of ash in his lungs where he could almost taste it, he could ruin them before a hand was put on him further, Stregobor didn’t get to touch him anymo-

“Julian, I fucked up with Yenna.”

Pale eyes in an ashen face, Istredd looked panicked. So close they were nearly on top of one another, chest to chest in the corridor and he could _smell_ the crackle of barely controlled Chaos. It belonged to one of them, either his own where it screamed beneath his skin or Istredd’s where he could feel the thrum of it. That panic on the other boys face cut for a moment, turned into something else, something horrified and stricken in an entirely different way. Like he might be sick, like he had witnessed something atrocious.

Like he _knew_.

Both hands on him then, held tight with a grip that threatened to bruise along his biceps. Istredd crowded him further, would have loomed if Julian hadn’t been the taller of the two now. The motion was the same even if the intention couldn’t have been any further than what he was used to. Istredd wouldn’t hurt him, wouldn’t touch him, but that didn’t quiet the fresh terror and rage that swam through his veins. 

“Julian, Julian did he really d-”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

Pale eyes wide, crazed, and Istredd stared at Julian like he might cry. Like he had any right to feel sick, to be upset. Nobody had put a hand on him, nobody had forced him to his knees and gagged him, bent him over a desk or pinned him to a wall and carved him apart from the inside. He hadn’t been betrayed by his own body, he didn’t know what it was like, he didn’t understand. It was terrifying and painful and it was _his_ , his pain that couldn’t be stripped from him just like everything else had. 

Istredd didn’t understand that though, he wouldn’t, not with how he held on tighter and partially pressed him into the cool stone wall. 

“Lilit be, Julian, why didn’t you _say_ somethi-”

“ _Enough_ , Istredd!”

Shrill panic that coated his throat and the backs of his teeth, his voice carried in the corridor around them. He flinched at the sound of it, at the stone to his back and Istredd’s hands on him where he’d never hesitated before. Like their idle affection had been taken from them, ruined. It burned, having Istredd’s hands on him when he could still feel bruises from Stregobor’s own touch. He knew how hard he’d scrubbed at his own skin just to try to get rid of the stain of his semen, any evidence of where he’d been. He had scoured himself raw in places just to try to make it stop, and Istredd clutched him with a different kind of tightness. 

Chest heaving but he couldn’t catch his breath, he couldn’t get that fist out of his ribs and away from his heart. 

Fingers gentled on his skin but there were new bruises pressed into the muscle there where Istredd had held too tight. Frost across his skin just the same, swatches of it painted across the other boy’s fingers that crawled up toward his wrists. A product of his fear, his panic that the other now wore, a physical marker that let them nearly match like some macabre joke. How amusing Destiny must have found them, how much she must have laughed at her own cruel irony. 

“ _Please._ ”

“Julian, I- _Gods_ , I’m so sorry.”

A wet sound, eyes burning and his throat acid-tinged where the tears tried to overflow. Istredd was careful then, hands soft but sure where he pulled Julian against him, held onto him like he might break if his touch was too heavy. As if he might be hurt worse still if his movements too fast, and the care given there made it difficult not to cry. He wanted to cling, to bury his face against his friend’s shoulder for somewhere to muffle the screaming he had only ever been able to either swallow or press into a pillow.

His fists curled in the immaculate stitching of his doublet instead, felt the fabric crinkle and give as he held tight. Slow arms around him, hesitation where Istredd had never thought twice before. He held on to Julian like he wasn’t quite sure how anymore and it burned, the sudden knowledge that everything had changed between them. Rience had vanished in the night like a runaway bride, he couldn’t lose Istredd too, not when the other man felt like all he had left. 

The moment stretched on the gossamer spun silk of a spider's web until they were interrupted with a _snap_ of another voice. A throat clearing, curious but vague as the man always managed to be, Master Argim looked between the pair as if they were some sort of puzzle he had only just discovered. 

His face burned, sticky with tears he hadn’t yet scrubbed away and Istredd didn’t seem inclined to let go even as the elder sorcerer started to speak.

“Julian, if you’ll come with me. Your time has come.”

No Rinivek to ground him and even Istredd wouldn’t be able to assist him with this, the change for _more_ suddenly upon him. His friends eyes had grown more pale after his own transformation, his features edged with a regal air where there hadn’t previously been such confidence there. Ascension was upon him, and it felt cottony and hollow in the wake of the maelstrom that had just torn through their part of the hall. What did his power matter when somebody knew?

Gentle touch to his side, leading where Istredd nudged him along and the other boy's eyes were bright. 

“Go, I’ll find you after.”

After he had gone forward with the step he couldn’t take back, made the decision that he couldn’t afford to regret. Later, when he didn’t look like himself and maybe didn’t quite feel like himself either.

Body numb and his heart doing its best to beat out of his ribs, he gave a wide glance to Istredd with his red rimmed eyes and his deliberate breathing before following Master Argim. 

There was silence between them the entire walk, beneath archways he had passed numerous times and through corridors that held the echoes of his laughter. Just over a year in these walls and he wondered if this place knew him just as well as he knew it. The silence used to be a comfort, but there was a suffocating edge to it now, broken glass laced and razor lined. If he breathed too hard he might cut himself, but if he didn’t breathe at all he would choke. 

How was he meant to win?

“I suppose you’ll be removing your more...unsightly aspects?”

Master Argim paused them at a closed door and Julian frowned. At the man, at the door, at the bigotry he could practically taste. 

Dozens of things he wanted to say, so many cutting words to counter or match every insult he had ever heard. There were only so many responses he could give to cutting glances or snide remarks though. Only so much energy he wished to expend on people that didn’t listen, didn’t care. 

He pushed through the door instead, let it slam shut behind him until only he and another sorcerer stood in the room.

-

Sharp cheekbones, a sturdy jaw, and his own full mouth. Features that were his own from before the fire just as much as they were from after. He knew the feel of his face even if he hadn’t touched it since the fire, but there was something different to it now. Smooth skin where he knew there should have been scars, where there _had_ been scars only an hour prior. 

How strange was it to see himself in the mirror and not quite recognize the turn of his own face?

That was his nose, but his skin had never been that smooth. His too blue eyes, but they had never been that heavily lashed. His mouth but the uneven gaps and faint turns to his teeth had been mended, the flesh a perpetual petal kissed pink. He felt almost normal, beautiful like he had never thought of himself but had always appreciated in his mother and Wim. There were no scars to be seen now, shoulders broadened like they had filled out in that hour, lines of muscle along his body as if he had never left that orchard and the hard work it put on him. 

The sorcerer had laughed at him, kind and warm like Julian’s amusement was a reward all its own. Had assured him that all of his elven features had been kept intact if not accentuated, eyes luminous and his previously scarred ear entirely unmarked. 

A clap on the shoulder, congratulations for his ascension, and a well-meant bit of thanks for allowing the man to have a part in it and he had sent Julian on his way. 

Let out in the hall just a little taller, a little broader, there was a brief moment where he wasn’t quite sure how to walk. He had always loved to dance, in the kitchen with his mother or barefooted out in the gardens when he should have been working, but there had been thought behind those movements. A deliberate, purposeful glide behind every step and turn, and he had loved the rhythm of it all. He had learned how to dance with fistfuls of his mother’s skirts and laughter on his tongue, and it had been a treasure.

He didn’t have to think about it now, each step as flowing and graceful as the last, footsteps barely audible against the cool stone floor. 

The gentle of music and poetry in his veins as if he breathed it and Julian walked with straight shoulders and a proud lift to his head. Someone had been in his room in the time that he had been gone, Istredd by the way that overly plush pillow had been plumped and joined by a second of its kind. His friend had gone to great lengths to find him something suitable, and Julian didn’t question the presence of such frippery even as he hesitated. Tentative to touch before he skimmed soft fingertips across unblemished silks. 

A militant, boxy collared doublet and breeches dyed a pale, wintery sage like he had never seen before. Shot through with glimmering, deep silver thread for the embroidery and fastens, he had never owned a chemise so gossamer or worn clothing so soft. It took a few tries to get the chemise right, slipped over his head and tied properly at his collarbones where the delicate fabric moved like water between his fingers. The breeches were easier, well-tailored and they clung to his thighs, high-waisted against the smooth flat of his abdomen. 

Like they were made for him.

He had never owned clothes like this, things that fit him like a second skin. Specifically his like nothing had ever been before, not the embroidered tunic he had for the _savaeds_ or the uniform he had been given upon arrival at Ban Ard. He had never thought to own something like this, something so perfectly his own, and he pressed both hands to the snug fabric across his belly. A gentle melody nested on his tongue and Julian couldn’t help the way he smiled down at the perfect, custom fit fabric. 

The doublet followed, twin rows of buttons along the outside of each arm up to his elbow to keep the cuff tight against the muscle. Another set along the center of his chest from that stiff, high collar, a double-breasted fashion to it that complimented the nearly cropped cut of the jacket. He felt proper like he never had, almost entirely put together and barefoot in the cold stone of his room. Felt _important_ , and wasn’t that a fanciful thing, clothed in expensive silks with his bare toes curled on the frigid stone of the room that had become his. 

He wasn’t the same boy from the Estate, he had come so far from that skinned kneed child; a crooked grin split his face as he quickly tugged on his boots, hopping from foot to foot before darting out of his room. 

Footsteps around the corner and he forced himself to slow, long enough to nod his head and pass by Master Argim and Ynsis headed toward the other boy’s transformation. Their bodies lost down the hall he had just come from, a breath waited, another and then he broke into that same run. Quick-paced down the hall, down the set of stairs until he could break into the main level where there were voices bouncing from the stones. Lit sconces and a warmth to the air where there hadn’t previously been, he practically threw himself to the landing. 

Crashed into another body that caught him quickly, instantly, a punched gust of breath against his throat and shoulder.

“By the _Gods_ , Julian!”

Istredd, a startled bout of laughter where the other boy held him and then there was an inhale, sharp and sudden before those hands gripped him. Gentle like they remembered and that was enough to make his skin want to crawl, but Istredd was his friend, his _brother_.

“Wait, wait, let me look at you.”

He had to look down a touch to be able to actually meet his eyes, but there must have been something to his face for Istredd grinned. Touched first his jaw to knock his head up a little, a mimicry of the way that he and Rience used to playfully swing at one another. Enough to make his eyes burn, but his hands migrated to his shoulders, kept Julian up straight and strong in his pale sage doublet and breeches set. The deep grey of his boots matched the fastens along his doublet and Istredd looked _proud_.

Those pale eyes flickered across his frame, took him in for a moment before they caught and held on his ears. 

His expression turned soft and Istredd smiled, squeezed a bit where he held him.

“You kept them.”

“They’re mine, of course I did.”

Pleased and one of them hugged the other but he couldn’t guess who moved first. They embraced like fools at the bottom of the grand stairs for a long moment before he was drawn aside. 

“There are Kings and Queens in the ballroom, and Aretuza girls. A lot of Aretuza girls, but I must warn you, we are vastly outnumbered.”

Nose curling, Julian scoffed at the thought that they hadn’t previously been outnumbered. Aristocracy was hardly his breed of people even if half of him belonged to their pedigree by blood alone. He would take his dirt and his endless blue skies, grass between his fingers before he confined himself to the gilded cage of a court.

“Are we being _auctioned?”_

“I’m afraid it would seem so.”

A scoff and an eye roll, comradery caught between them and he leaned against Istredd for a moment just for the sake of it. 

“Neither of us have been promised to a court, do we _have_ to attend?”

A fair enough question, but his answer came from the way Istredd laughed at him, careful fingers along his forearm to tug him into the hall. 

And outnumbered they were, aristocracy littered throughout the room as if they owned it. Kings and Queens and nobility like he had never thought to see in a singular space, draped in their silks and their satins, delicate golden jewelry dripping from their fingers and throats to match their gemstone encrusted crowns. Their hands alone contained more wealth than he had ever thought to exist, their presence demanding even if they hadn’t spared the pair an ounce of their attention. Instead they laughed amongst themselves, dotted heavily around the room like feral dogs watching their supposed lambs for slaughter. 

A goblet of deep red wine passed to him and a tentative sip washed Evreluce across his tongue, only recently introduced to his palate but rich and full bodied with a cherry tinged sweetness. Tart and he licked the taste of it from his lower lip, nodded his thanks to Istredd before the other boy stepped away to talk to the archeologist he recognized from the library.

Julian stood alone then, another sip of his drink taken as he scanned the room with jewel bright eyes. 

“-surprised they have one here.”

“Nonsense. They simply haven’t decided to eradicate it yet.”

Goblet held aloft from his lips and his face kept carefully blank but his gaze cut to the two that spoke closest to he. A slight woman with fiery hair coiled and twisted and pilled atop her head within the silver and diamond braid of her crown and she watched him with a polite, painted sneer upon her thin lips. Her companion held similar coloration, the same dark eyes and the same sharp nose. Siblings at least, twins by his guess if anyone were to bother to ask him. 

The pair of them watched him like some kind of diseased animal and the Evreluce settled in his belly like vinegar. 

“Perhaps they’ve kept it for research? There can’t be more than a handful of elves on the Continent anymore.”

“Not since the Great Cleansing began, certainly.”

The Evreluce tasted rotten, curdled in his throat and his grip went white knuckled where he clasped it. Stared at the two for a long, heart throbbing minute before turning heel and striding from the ballroom just as quickly as he had come. Goblet discarded on one of the buffet tables and the heavy wooden doors rattled shut behind him as he walked, blood rushing in his high pointed ears as he moved. 

As he distantly heard Istredd call his name but he didn’t stop, couldn’t, not with the limited possibilities of what that could mean heavy in his chest. Cleansing, like something had been purified, like the racism that he had breathed through the oppression of his entire life had reached a boiling point. Like they had been found so unclean that they needed to be removed, he took the stairs two at a time as he hurried up the case, back into the hall where he had come from. 

Found Master Argim and the contempt within those eyes that he recognized now and it burned just as the Evreluce had. 

“Julian, you should b-”

Fistfull of the man’s crisp burgundy doublet and he forced the both of them to the wall, a dark kind of delight to be found in the way he stood the taller of the two now. Argim didn’t fight him, pressed against the stone and his distaste was so thick that Julian could taste it against the flat of his teeth. There was something like fear there, his pupils just a touch too visible and Julian pressed into it. Fed that feeling as he felt his Chaos crackle and beg to bloom within him.

“Tell me about the Great Cleansing.”

“It began days ago.” Those eyes broke contact, flickered to his ears and Julian snarled. “A shame you kept those.”

Enough of an answer for the things he hadn’t been able to ask.

A shame he hadn’t the time to undo the man like he wanted to. His lungs full of parchment, his organs made of kindling just waiting to catch flame. He pushed away from Argim with enough force that the elder snapped back against the wall but he made no move to follow. Stood idle instead and self preserving as that rage funneled into the portal that ripped open along the opposite wall. It would have taken nothing to toss Argim through it into whatever lay beyond, but Julian stared at him instead with a harsh, bright fury and stepped backwards through the portal himself.

The air had gone thick with blood, a spill of it so plentiful that he could smell it over the late-season bloom of oranges. Vibrant splashes of vermillion and bittersweet across the sea of trees that surrounded the Estate and the trees had gone past heavy where the fruit had turned over-ripe and begun to fall to the dirt, rotten and weeping. 

Silence across the grounds as the portal seamed shut behind him, it had never been so quiet here. Not in this place of labor where he had worked calluses deep into the grooves of his palms and the tips of his fingers. There should have been the distant swell of chatter, laughter carried on what was left of the warm breeze with the pleasant yeast curl of baking bread and roasting meat. Instead there was blood, iron so heavy that he could taste it on his tongue as if he had taken a mouthful all on his own.

The over sweet char of burnt flesh clung to everything and he wanted to sob.

It felt like a lifetime ago since he had run through these trees, his body taller and his soul older. More than a year away from this place had changed him more than fifteen years upon its grounds had ever managed to. He felt wiser, changed, but he still feared like a child as he sprinted past the empty stables and into the rear courtyard for the kitchens. There was no Crendor with the chickens and the geese, no Thiaresh or Ceifevia tending to the herbs that almost grew faster than they could manage. He nearly faltered at the lack of them, there should have been a mass of bodies on the grounds rushing to finish the evenings chores.

His boots echoed on the flagstones in the ringing silence, only the half-dried smears of blood across the ground there to greet him. 

The kitchen was cold, ovens unlit and the shutters pulled tight. Soot across the floor with marks from bare feet, pulling fingers across the table where his mother made dough for hours at a time. Flaking brown splatters where there should have been her laughter, stale air and rotting meat where she should have embraced him, but it smelled of blood even here. 

He left the kitchen behind because he had to, no other choice when there were so few places she could be in a place so large. But the corridors were worse, pooled blood left on the floor as if there were nobody present to scrub it away, smear marks from where bodies had been dragged away from the puddles. Carnage unleashed in the halls where he had learned to be neither seen nor heard, it was with a film of panic shrouded across his vision that he tore through the manor. There should have been anybody, there should have been servants, maids closing the drapes and lighting candles and returning from the dining hall with the trays of food that Maxim had wasted. 

A hand smear of blood on the corner of the wall gone brown and dry; feminine, small palm and thin fingered where they had tried to hold on for their life. 

The Manor reeked of death and Julian rounded the corner to the servants quarters. No chatter, no Ferna trying to herd his children or Dassa making certain that her elderly mother made it to her bed. Blood where there should have been talk, empty air where there should have been darting children and overworked parents. No sight of his mother in her modest little room, and the closet with a cot that had been his own. A thin layer of dust had gathered in the room, the bed undisturbed no doubt since that last morning he had made it. 

There was nobody _here_ , and Julian left just as quickly as he had come. Through the main corridor for the servants quarters and into the main hall, but there were no guards and the sconces were yet unlit. 

Nothing was right, but cut a path across the Manor all the same.

The door for the great room stood unchanged, heavy drapery and subpar lighting. The long table, the high backed chairs, and there sat Maxim, dark eyed and pale in the almost-throne of his that Julian had once nearly forged him to. The urge was there now, he could taste that fire licking at his tongue and the roof of his mouth with the promise to blister and burn. He wanted it to, ached to let it for all that he stared at the man from across the room.

Caught the feverish glaze to his eyes and the sour stench permiating from his person. 

“Where is she?”

He _smiled_ , sharp and off-kilter and consumed by a madness that Julian could see the descent of. His grey doublet was stained at the armpits, at the collar with sweat and dark splotches from blood. Unkempt like no noble would ever be caught dead as, what decorum the man could have pretended to have ruined by the dirt upon his face and the bruises about his throat. But he smiled like he had missed Julian, and a shrill bell sounded within his skull. 

“My boy, you shouldn’t hav-”

“ _Where is my mother?”_

A seething question from between clenched teeth, fear was a peculiar, feral beast that fed on things he wished to never give it. He felt like a boy of five and a man of five hundred all at once, tangled up in himself and ready to both sob and scream from the injustice of it all. For he knew the answer before he even asked, her absence a gaping, festering wound that bloomed in his chest no matter how he tried to deny it. She was gone and only blood remained, the quiet of death and this deranged shell of a man who had once tried to own him.

“She went to the fire with all the other rats!”

Crackling laughter, jarring and high as the man tipped back in his chair. 

He didn’t laugh for long, not as that swell of rage took on a life of its own. The drapes caught flame at their bases, quick licks of it that climbed the heavy velvet until it ate too at the wooden frames. The table caved in on itself, a tableau of fire that reached for the high ceiling, that caught on Maxim’s chair and clothes. That caught his skin with the immediate scent of cooking meat gone too far and sour in the span of a heartbeat, laughter turned to screaming as the man’s body melded itself to his chair. Bubbling skin and clothing gone to ash, teeth aglow from the heat while his eyes sizzled and burst within their sockets. The sound barely had a chance to really even be a scream before it became a rattling, smoke billowing bellow of ash and burnt blood. 

What had once been his skin flaked to the floor and Julian stared for a long moment at the bright flames before bolting from the room. Down that corridor where he used to scrub the stones on his hands and knees to the servants quarters with the blister of heat behind him. It followed his every step, turned the floor molten and lit the Manor like it had never been before. The heavy doors crackled and went up like fresh kindeling as he passed into the kitchen, what remained in the stone ovens igniting with a roar.

He collapsed just past the blood stained flagstones. Weight caught with his knees and his palms and he doubled over, face pressed to the dirt of the garden as he grappled at his own waist. Held himself where she wouldn't, couldn't, and he screamed then. A wet wailing that tore from deep within his chest, fed freely to the dirt where it did its best to cradle him. Vision blurred from tears but everything burned, a raging inferno that turned every stone of the Manor to glowing coals as he curled into himself. Felt the heat of the flames where they curled around him but didn’t touch, a gentle warmth compared to the destruction that he could sense just beyond his place in the dirt.

The wooded screaming of trees taken to flame, the blackened nectar smell of burning fruit and he cried like a child for the horror he had lived through and the things he had lost.

He cried as the countryside burned all around him, flames from the shore past the wheat fields in the distance, and his tears fell even after only he remained in the swirling ash.

Head raised, face tear slicked and raw, he sat at the epicenter of the burning carnage that he had wrought and stared at the dandelion that refused to die.

-

Julian arrived in Kerack just days behind the massacre of the Great Cleansing, and he never left. He lost himself in the bloodshed and the violence and burnt out remains of the Pankratz Estate. Nobody survived Lettenhove, and Julian was no exception, not a single living soul to be found in the husks of buildings and the smoldering remains of their fields.

Julian never left Kerack, but Jaskier did.

He wandered through the forests and took animal bones and the blood of bandits and the golden bauble that hung from a pointed ear and glamoured himself human. Frail and sharp-toothed in the places he should be, nothing cut the music on his tongue or the melodies that lived in his fingers. As human as the rest of the world even if he couldn’t keep the grace from his movements or the lyrical tone from his voice. 

Copious amounts of alcohol dulled the effects slightly, but there was a delicate balance between enough to dull the throb of rage and grief and too much. Too much made Elder spill from his tongue like water, slurs and humorous jibs and scathing comments that nobody understood for all that they side-eyed him. The bottle was dangerous, something he came to crave after five years of nursing it and another ten passed before he could wean himself back off. Not a drop touched, wide berth given and instead he turned to music where he feared to touch his Chaos. 

He found himself in a lute, the wide belly and the slender neck, sharp strings that made beautiful sounds if he strummed them just right. 

Calluses eventually formed along the pads of his fingertips to match the work worn ones on his palms. The strings stopped hurting and the only sounds he began to pull from the instrument were a harmonious series of notes, music worked to smooth down the broken edges that Stregobor and the Cleansing had left in their wake. He slept lightly, ready to bolt at a moment's notice, and he drowned what he could of his furious emotions with chatter, bundles of notebooks kept for observations of plants, of creatures, of people and their habits and places he had seen and those he still wanted to experience. 

Fifty years came and went in a flurry of nightmares and finding Istredd by sheer dumb luck. Parties and court balls, galas and festivals before he dropped himself into Oxenfurt just for something to do. He excelled at his courses just as he had at Ban Ard, musical theory and liberal arts far less daunting than catching lightning in a bottle. Six years where it should have taken him ten, but he left with the same hunger for more that had carried him in, his mastery of the arts only managing to fuel his fire for adventure. 

He kept an ear to the ground through it all, there had to be somebody out there, there had to be _something_ , some relic of his people even if his mother had never taught him such things. 

It brought him to Posada, just outside of the grasp of Ban Ard but close enough to the curve of the Blue Mountains that he could see them in the distance. 

He found a tavern with a crowd that hated him because he was too bored to put his heart into it, it had been too long since a crowd had given him cause for the soft of mischief that he knew himself capable of. He pocketed the bread they threw because free food wasn’t something he would ever frown at, and he bowed in a graceful, exaggerated sweep like the showman that he had grown to be. Caught golden, molten eyes across the tavern when he straightened and felt his heart do the strangest dance in his chest.

He found a Witcher that carried the mark of battles across his body and his soul as golden as his eyes in a tavern at the End of the World, and Jaskier handed over his heart without hesitation.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay darlings, covid season hasn't been very kind. Enjoy Jaskier!

“-death and destiny. Heroics and heartache.”

Death followed him like a cloud of perfume, the loam and breakwater scent of churning destruction unlike anything else. It lingered on his amour like it belonged there, like it knew no other home, a scented shadow that dogged his every step. Hair like starlight and eyes like the sun, the man was the cosmos barely contained on battle-hardened flesh. He was as beautiful as he was brutal, and his fingers ached to touch. 

_ Gwynbleidd _ , a white wolf in all of his leather and metal worked glory, he walked with purpose and looked like a dream and Jaskier had never thought to look at the face of his own destruction. This was the cliff he would give himself to, this was surely the only fire that he would ever let consume him. 

“ _Beannaich me, o bhàs, oir ach pòg._ ”

His Mother had told him that their blood only loved once, and he knew a disaster when he saw one. A moth to any flame and he swanned forward all the same, walked with the man who did his best to leave the bard behind. This would be his undoing, and he watched the horse where she side-eyed him, her tail snapping away a few flies that thought themselves lucky. Just as sour as her master, and he wondered if her heart was just as tender for surely it was just as guarded. 

“It’s onion.”

His voice carried like thunder across the sea at night and it was ridiculous, how he thought he could drown from such a simple, stupid sentence. 

Onion, like it could ever be onion. Sweat and horse, certainly, but it was desolation and loneliness and resignation if Jaskier had ever known it. A different flavor to be sure, nothing like the press of wrinkled hands upon his shoulders or the top of his head but he knew. He had never been the self-preserving type, but he knew enough about men like this. He called it onion, like ruin could be surmised in the scent of something so simple, but Jaskier knew enough to know he would never survive this Witcher. 

“Right, yeah. Yeah. Oh, I could be your barker, spreading the tales of Geralt of Rivia,” He would never be the same after this man, but he stepped for that cliff like he had reached for the lightning. Let his mouth run and knew well the trouble it would get him, such a sharp silver tongue had never failed him before. Men like this kept things they didn’t understand, and Jaskier refused to be left behind. “the-the Butcher of Blaviken!”

Predictable and resolute, words meant to cut like well-placed barbs behind a guileless expression. He knew his own expression of innocence like he knew the kind of tension that overtook those broad shoulders. Geralt had been cut from the finest stone, and Jaskier wondered idly where that first chisel press had been made, how long it had taken for the first crack to be made and plastered over. 

“Come here.”

Marble expression and a heart he had tried to convince himself was made of the same pale stone, he wondered how long this man had been alone. Worse still, he knew he should have cared, been alarmed at how quickly he fell in line from such a simple command. Stregobor had been cold, ice within his veins and a frozen fist wrapped about his heart, he knew those kind of words and how he hated having to follow. This Witcher burned hot, the same empty tone but there were leagues of silent emotion and intent buried beneath it that he couldn’t begin to pull apart. 

“Yeah?”

It felt like staring at the sun, and Jaskier wanted to burn. 

He knew the punch was there, knew it where it would land and how hard the man would hit, knew that he pulled his punch due to his perceived delicate nature and the way the Witcher would never admit it. It staggered him all the same, stole his breath and burst stars behind his eyes and Jaskier would have laughed if only he could breathe. 

No, he wouldn’t survive this man, but if ever there was a fire where he wished to burn.

-

The woman was a violent, vicious thing with the promise of sinew between her blunt teeth, all unwashed flesh and biting tongue. She thought herself powerful but he could smell her hunger, he could practically taste her fear. Such desperation led to stupidity. Such stupidity would no doubt make her sloppy for all that it would make her cruel. Like a rabid dog, hungry and howling with gnashing teeth.

_ “You shut up!” _

“My Elder speech is rough.” Serpentine lies from a plush tongue, she thought herself entitled but he knew his own power. She wasn’t old enough to know the ferocity that she spewed, she knew the things that had come  _ after _ , the ashes that remained once the fires had been drowned out in blood. Her grief was her own, surely, and she had the right to own it, but her desperation would get innocents killed. “I only got part of that.”

“Humans, shut up.”

She thought herself  _ clever _ , and Jaskier knew himself to be bored. 

_ “Ah, got it, thanks so much.” _

She snarled like she meant to bite him and he would have welcomed her to try, Elder pure and lyrical slipping from his tongue better than any Common ever would. 

“Do you wanna die right now?”

He half expected there to be froth from between her cracked lips, but his snarling response was lost beneath a dry quip from his back.

“As opposed to later?”

_ Dana Maedbh _ , the man chose  _ now _ to have a sense of humor? Sharp dry wit that rolled off the tongue like some kind of blessing, Jaskier could feel the slow measure of his breathing but he couldn’t even begin to see the Witcher. They were supposed to be some indomitable force, Witchers were, flesh and bone given the strength of monsters and the stamina of beasts. The very things that they slaughtered, he remembered enough of his studies that had mentioned them, he knew enough of the few that he had crossed paths with in the last fifty years. He knew enough, just like he knew that Geralt hadn’t even tried to stand to free himself, hadn’t used any of the weaponry that he  _ surely _ had hidden away on his person. 

A Witcher was never defenseless, and they were only bound together by their spines, but the man made no motion to move. 

“No, please, not the lu-”

His distraction kept him from expecting the kick to his midsection, lungs burning as he gasped, as he watched a miscreant with starvation bright eyes wrap dirty fingers around the lute that he had won in a botched Gwent game six years back.

Oh but he couldn’t breathe for his heaving for all that he could hear Geralt snarl, could  _ feel _ the vibrations against his spine that made him shiver and shake.

“Leave off! He’s just a bard.”

Just a bard but how he could feel the ozone bloom of Chaos in the depths of his belly. The promise of lightning barely contained and he could have screamed with it, could have held sparks between his teeth just to watch the way that they skittered and danced in their fear. 

He swallowed it instead, beat the burn of it back down into his blood as he felt a strike crack through the Witcher’s frame.

“You don’t deserve the air you breathe.” Jaskier rocked with the recoil of the next hit, heels dug into the cave floor for some kind of purchase. “Everything you touch, you destroy.”

Sharp and discordant, the shrill twang of broken strings as the ashwood neck snapped. As the elf split his perfectly, legitimately earned gambling lute, as if he hadn’t spent hours getting a man miserably drunk on black henbane wine. Perfectly good herbs absolutely wasted, Jaskier stared at the mess that had been made of one of the few possessions he carried on his person. Splinters and snapped strings, ruined wood and tuning prongs scattering across the cave floor as he rocked forward.

It was just a lute, he could conjure another but it was  _ his _ where so much had already been taken. 

“You hide in your golden palaces.” Vitriol and hate upon his tongue and it burned like the cave dust on her skin. When had she last eaten, when had they last felt safe? What sort of madness drew the straggling survivors of his kind to such hostility? “You beat a bound man, too scared to even look him in the eye!”

Was this what had become of them? There had been pride once, he remembered it in familiar faces and the rituals that governed every  _ savaed _ . There had been joy and laughter in song and in work that he knew down to the rich marrow of his bones, but he could find none of it here. Only starvation and terror hidden behind bared blunt teeth and sun-darkened skin, surely  _ this _ was not all that was left for him?

“Do you like my palace?” A sneering hum on her breathe, there had to be more for him than this. “Does it live up to the tales you humans tell?”

He knew the stories, the golden palaces tucked away in the Blue Mountains where the elves hoarded their treasures, he knew the things that humans said. The way they had run, the blood that had been spilled, but he remembered the screaming and the fires, the piles upon piles of bodies with necrophages come to feast that had turned to rubble beneath his grieving rage. Humans thought they lived like royalty in the frosted peaks where they could be untouched, and he had dreamed, he had hoped. Such a dangerous thing that was, and the flurry of moths in his chest fluttered and trembled, entrapped within his ribs and desperate. 

Body rocking harshly as Geralt moved, as he clacked their skulls together and Jaskier nearly swore, body leaving the dirt for but a moment as she fell. Caught herself in the dirt as she coughed and spat blood, and Jaskier craned his neck just to find her where she lay. Curled around herself like some kind of fallen huntress with blood down her chin, a battle wound that she hadn’t earned but it was like he could smell the death and decay from inside her lungs. 

His retort about the point of her ears lost with a spill of concern that he couldn’t pull out from the roots, Jaskier wanted to reach out for her. Touch to her forehead and her throat where his hands were bound, but he sought her eyes instead and fell in the space between blinks and the-

_ Festering hunger in her belly but her brother needed it more, thin until her fingers touched to his ribs when she wrapped her arms around him. His body shook like he couldn’t contain his coughs, the wet rasp in his lungs that nothing she did could fix. She couldn’t make it stop, she couldn’t get him to breathe properly long enough to sip at the potions that he needed, that he would die without.  _

_ Her own body hurt but his life was bigger, young enough that he could do more if she could just get him to keep the potions down.  _

_ “Tuvemde, please.” _

_ He turned his face from her and she wanted to scream, the half empty bottle clutched tight in her fist. They needed to eat, she needed to hunt, but she didn’t trust to leave him if he wouldn’t take the medication when they had it.  _

_ “Tuvemde, please, you have t-” _

_ “Toruviel, no.” _

wet rhythm of her breathing where she swiped at her mouth. 

“Wait, what’s-” He knew even where he didn’t want to ask, there had been blood on the inside of her brothers lips and stained into his gums. Wet in his lungs like pneumonia that had sunk too deep and she had it too, that cutting curl to her breathing that was impossibly loud now that he knew what to listen for. “What’s wrong with her?” 

“She’s sick.”

She was dying, but the blond man knew that, regal and resigned all in the same breath. An elegance in his rags and the unwashed scraggle of his hair, there was that same hunger within his face that lay in the other two. 

The Sylvan from before came back with him, the two of them swept into the cavern with its blood and the broken pieces of his lute. 

“Oh,” Curiosity tasted like contempt where it curled across his tongue, sounded nearly the same with the dust and dirt acoss his flat brow. “And who’s this?”

“He’s Filavandrel, King of the Elves.”

_ He’s Filavandrel _ , and the ground came out from beneath him, his blood a tidal rush in his ears that drowned out all sound until it was all he knew. All he could hear, and Jaskier sagged back against the breadth of Geralt’s shoulders. He felt the rumble that accompanied his speech but the words were lost to him, eyes staring hot and empty at the man who was their King. Their  _ King,  _ he had heard stories of Filavandrel, his mother had crooned lullabies and legends about the King of Dol Blathanna until he knew every story like a hymn. How he had ruled altruistically where Francesca had failed them with her greed and her vanity, but the man had only ever been that. 

A legend and a lullaby and he stood before Jaskier now with dirt upon his proud cheeks and rags upon his noble frame. 

How his mother would have cried at the sight of him, how she would have taken to her knees and wept with the sort of prayer that she had instilled into his bones and his blood.  _ Dana Maebdh _ bless them all and carry them to the eternal spring, she had told him stories of Filavandrel the proud and the sanctity that his rule would promise them given the chance. 

He spoke of silver towers and shaking of hands that had dug a grave for the whole of them and Jaskier could taste the spill of pain along his lips and tongue despite the distance that separated them. He breathed with it, carried the guilt of it all like an old cloak that he couldn’t unclasp until it smothered him, blood soaked and ash encrusted where its presence had only fanned the flames. 

He  _ spoke _ , and Jaskier thought he would be sick, thought he could cry. 

It wasn’t until the ropes binding him in place slackened their hold that he became aware once more, blinked with dry eyes and sat in the shadow of the Witcher who hadn’t left him behind. Who had refused bloodshed where it was unnecessary, who had defended him without knowing his nature. No hand offered but the man stood as a sentinel instead as he rose to his feet and brushed away what he could of the scent of blood scowering through his lungs. His presence was more than enough, a strength where Jaskier surely would have faltered on his own. 

Geralt moved and Filavandrel came into his view, sharp eyed and watchful, curious. 

“A beautiful instrument, I’m sorry for your loss.”

Too knowing eyes and it was quick like breathing, one foot on the ground and  _ you’ve hidden for so long, haven’t you child? _ He blinked back a quick rush of tears, watched the way Filavandrel watched him and stood with the knowledge that the man knew all of the things that he had worked so hard to hide. How strange it was to suddenly be seen, to be known when only Istredd recognized him these days, when only Rinivek knew his voice. 

“If you would allow me, I would appreciate the chance to replace it.” Head inclined to further down the cave and his Witcher stood at the ready, partially engrossed in conversation with the Sylvan over a map.  _ His _ Witcher, like he had any claim to the man other than the bloody stamp that his heart had tried its best to leave. Jaskier stared at broad shoulders and starlight pale hair for a moment before finding the King again. Poised and expectant who must have found something he recognized for he turned, waited a half step for Jaskier to follow. “Come.”

He ached not to, to stay in the cavern where he could pretend that nothing had changed, that he hadn’t learned answers to questions that he had purposefully left unasked. 

He followed where his usurped King led, felt a child in the man's wake even as he kept close. Down a thin carved tunnel into another chamber, felt the organic ripple of Chaos not his own across his skin like the tender touch of a parent welcoming their child home. He shuddered and nearly sagged beneath it, body automatically tipping into the embrace of it like stepping in from the cold. Such a simple comfort and he could have cried, recognized the feel of it now from his mother’s kitchen and ached for memories where he could never return to but in dreams. 

_ “What is your name, child? _ ”

Elder pure like a mountain spring and windsong singing, he wouldn’t weep now where he hadn’t in decades but it was a near thing. The man looked at him with such unbridled compassion and patience, like Jaskier was a wayward son finally returned home after years spent in the wilds. It made him want to take to his knees, sent a wailing inside that made him feel like the child he hadn’t been for more than sixty years but he kept silent. Composed and guarded like he could never not be anymore, too much had been taken for breathing to be free. 

_ “Jaskier.” _

There was a quiet, wordless sound of understanding and grief, this man knew as well as he that it was his for all that it wasn’t, but he didn’t press. 

_ “You wear it well, flower. How long have you been in the world?” _

_ “I was seventeen at Ban Ard when the fires started.”  _ A thick swallow and Jaskier paused, cautious and yearning in equal measure- how long had it been since he had spoken to another of his blood? How many years had it been since his mother’s tongue had slipped from his tongue and human glamoured teeth in place of Common?  _ “I’ve been alone since.” _

Long enough for that empty to have become something else deep inside, the skin grown back over the wound for all that a cavern festered in his chest. 

Eyes closing, he watched as something like mourning passed across Filavandrel’s face before it too settled on his shoulders. A blade of grass against the burden the man already bore, but he must have felt it all the same for the deep breath that he took and held. This would stay with him just as every other failure must have, and Jaskier wondered how many still wandered like he had, lost and unaware. How many had been buried by teeth and claws beneath the stars where the possibility of home had escaped them?

He had spoken of infants being fertilizer for the very fields that humans now plowed, how many babies had this forgotten King had to leave in an unmarked grave?

_ “I grieve for thee and what you have lost.” _ Tempered and gentle, this man would have been a father and perhaps he was. A brother maybe but no doubt a son, he had learned that quiet care from somewhere. It was given freely now, generously as if the both of them were family that hadn’t seen one another in years. Filavandrel watched him for a long moment before turning and pulling open a long chest, a sturdy leather case caught in his grasp.  _ “You will always have a home here, no matter how far you roam or where your journey ends.” _

-

“That’s not how it happened. Where’s your newfound respect?”

Dust washed and tired, yet the Witcher looked majestic on his chestnut mare. No white horse nor gilded shield, he was physically far from the type of man that anecdotes of chivalry and honor had been written about. Flawed for the temper that Jaskier could practically feel burning under his skin, carefully kind where it was hidden behind a thick armor of stoicism until his silence could easy be confused for malice. He was no knight for he was more, breathing and faulty and  _ real _ . 

His smile tasted sad, and Jaskier wondered if the Witcher could smell his lingering despondency.

“Respect doesn’t make history.”

The truth wouldn’t keep Filavandrel and his colony alive, and the both of them knew it.

-

A rigorous burst of noise from the tavern below had startled him an hour prior, sent his inkpot jittering across the little two stool table where his knee had cracked against the underside. He had caught the pot and kept it from spilling, but ink had spilled across his fingertips and immediately stained them dark. A swear given to the empty room but he had let the blackness stay there, didn’t fight the way it seeped into his skin now anymore than he had back in the library of Ban Ard. For all that he didn’t care to be wasteful, a little ink never killed anybody, not unless it was used right. 

He had placed a single ward at the stable for the inn, the only notice he would get for his Witcher’s return. Hours had passed since then, the sun long set and the roar of the tavern and its inhabitants had settled further into a drunken murmur, so inebriated they couldn’t remember how much coin they had parted with for his songs. The lute he had been given sang like a dream, Ofieri rosewood that gleamed a deep blend of amber and carmine, he had loathed to take it from its case that first day, terrified of it turning to ash just like everything always did. But held it he had, and his lute hadn’t burned and weeks had come and gone since then, with his pockets piled heavy with coin that he dumped quietly into Geralt’s own stores. 

The villagers had drank plenty, their purses gone remarkably light, but the blessing whispered out across their fields for prosperous harvests would be enough to sustain them when the cold came. 

One leg tucked beneath him, the other raised to balance his tankard of ale on the cap, practice made it easy to embrace his own bent leg to write in his journal. The most recently purchased, some two years old and not even a third filled yet, but the words were easy when they decided to come. When there was something worth keeping, a memory that needed preserved beyond the limitations of his own mind lest it fail him one day. These last few weeks had been worth more priceless memories than the years he had wandered by himself, and Jaskier ached with how reverent he had already become. 

He had played until his fingers burned and turned tender to the touch, lungs aflame as the people collapsed on themselves. Until his throat had gone dust dry and he had excused himself to the safety of their room, exchanged oiled strings for a quill and ink, lecherous choruses for the gentle scratch of his quill tip across parchment. Quieter creature comforts that only lacked unseemly laughter from companions that couldn’t hold their tongues, the crackle of the fire in the hearth was good enough. Their original room hadn’t come with such an amenity, but Geralt had left him with their unnecessary packs without stepping foot into the inn, the man didn’t need to know the Chaos laced crooning that had gone into getting them far better accommodations. 

He didn’t need to know much apart from how to kill monsters and which direction he wished for them to travel, Jaskier would happily, silently take care of the rest. 

A small sparkling burst of color that splashed the room in blue and he pulled the boiling charm away from the overly large tub with a snap. Took the preservation touches away from the food and ale that sat beside him at the table as the door to the inn opened below. Heard the murmur of the innkeep talking, the drunken rabble being shuffled out as footsteps touched the stairs. Just a touch heavy once out of view, like he was tired, like the hunt had been harder than they had initially assumed. A single werewolf shouldn’t have been enough for such a degree of lethargy, not without complications, but Jaskier had done his part. 

Steam curled in thick tendrils from the surface of the tub as the door opened, and Geralt looked as if he had been bathed in blood. 

“Are you alright?”

Monosyllabic grunts didn’t stand in place of answers, but Geralt gave hums and quiet tones just as often as he gave loded silences. It would take weeks yet still to dissect every one properly, but for all that the Witcher seemed bent on leaving him behind, they had time. Jaskier would know the man just as he knew himself or Istredd, if only given the chance to observe. 

One such grunt was given now, his concern almost waved away by the man's inability to articulate. He had eyes for the bath instead, lush with steam and dissolved rich rock salts and the aromatic of delicate oils. There had been time and care put into that tub, things from his own personal stores that Jaskier only pulled from when he was truly alone. The Witcher watched it now like it might bite him, like the metal basin contained more than things meant to soothe his weary bones. 

“I thought you might appreciate a hot bath.”

His swords set aside carefully and he began to pull at his armor, movements slow. Not quite sluggish but delayed all the same, like his shoulders pulled harder than they should have, as if the muscles in his arms and back had seamed themselves to his bones. It must have hurt, ached at the very least, but he knew enough by now to know the man would never admit to it. He would never voice his own discomfort just as he would never ask for assistance whether he needed it or not, though certainly less so if he needed it. 

They would need to get him new armor soon, though he knew well enough that Geralt would keep such a need to himself until the last possible moment. Past then even if he wasn’t lucky, the man was taciturn like that. 

Close inspection showed that most of the blood wasn’t his, hard leather breastplate and gorget removed with practiced fingers across the buckles. The mostly healed mark of claws against his shoulder where the pieces didn’t overlap like they should have, his armor seemed to be ramshackled together from pieces that had seen their better years. As if the Witcher couldn’t afford to replace them, as if he hadn’t been able to for some time. His fingers itched to touch, and Jaskier bit at his own tongue instead, eyes sliding over broad shoulders and tapered waist to see if any of the other injuries were more than a scratch. 

Nothing deep, nothing that wouldn’t heal unblemished within a few hours, nothing that the bath wouldn’t help. 

He held his tongue as the Witcher stripped off the rest of his armor, didn’t bother to avert his gaze even as he stood bare in the fire-warmed room. Somewhere between artistic liberty and a scholar's curiosity, but far be it from he to not appreciate a beautiful form. 

One of these days he would draw him, immortalize the Witcher in ink like he had begun to do in song.

The glamour took their shape, but his sharp ears still heard more than they should have and he caught the slow exhale. Saw the tension begin to leak from scarred shoulders and watched Geralt’s body sink lower into the water still. Low enough that his head fell back against the lip of the tub with a silent sigh, moonlight hair drifting slightly upon the surface. It had darkened in places with blood, matted down against his skull in a spray pattern like a bucket had upended upon his head. Like he’d slit the throat of a breathing creature while it held itself over him, and Jaskier sighed. 

“You owe me a story.”

Eyes closed, body at rest even if he wasn’t yet clean, Geralt lounged in the tub that fit him for a change. The water had just finished boiling, so hot it must have been painful, but the man treated it like the best thing he had experienced in days. He didn’t move when Jaskier spoke, nor when he set his things on the table and uncurled from his chair. Bare feet on the cool floor and a chilled, full tankard taken up into his palm. 

“Do I now.”

Low spoken words like a run of thunder across the Kerackian coast, breakwater between his teeth and tongue and the cupid’s bow of his lips. 

“You can deny it all you like, darling, but we both know you love when I ask questions.”

Luminous eyes blinked open, cat-like and lidded where Geralt stared at him through the steam, but the faint crinkling at the corners was the closest Jaskier had gotten him yet to a smile. He held onto that little expression with desperate hands even as he offered the ale. 

Geralt didn’t disappoint, took the tankard with bloodied fingers and a long swallow like he  _ knew _ Jaskier hung on every word he might say. 

“Did you know that werewolves can collect as mated pairs?”

-

“I’m just saying-”

“Funny, I don’t remember asking.”

“-this wouldn’t be a problem if you  _ actually _ made them pay you.”

Liquid fat rolled down the outside of his thumb to his wrist, golden in the firelight. The rabbit skewer he’d been given weighed heavy on one side, listed like it might lose some of the meat carefully laced on the metal. He wielded it like a weapon, shook it like the threat it would never manage to be in his hands. Not as far as Geralt knew, human and clumsy because it was strange still to walk when his bones felt heavier than they should have. 

They could have had a steaming bath and chilled ale for the both of them, but Geralt hadn’t argued for coin and Jaskier refused to expose himself just for a little pampering. 

He could live without a bath, but Geralt couldn’t very well survive without coin. 

The man took a bite of his own food instead of answering, teeth digging into a chunk of rabbit to pull it off the metal spit. Jaw flexing as he chewed, but Jaskier brandished his own spit like he meant to stab something. A tiny, ill-placed sword that he didn’t even hold properly, too thin for any real damage beyond holding roasted meat. Still a little hot to the touch, another line of fat ran down his arm and he bent forward, licked it from his forearm before it could hit his elbow. 

“Eight endrega warriors, and you didn’t even ask them for a single coin.”

Thin faces and tired eyes, the children that he had caught sight of had been entirely too small. Many of the homes had looked to be abandoned, fallen into various states of disrepair as if the last snow had been too harsh upon them. Like it had stripped more than just their soil from them, famine and fear set hand in hand to walk down their dirt streets. They had been afraid, moreso of the world that laid beyond their clearing than the Witcher that had ridden into their town. 

Few of their merchants had been brave enough to try to leave, but none of them had made it far and certainly none of them had returned. 

A nest had taken hold in the forest that surrounded them, and none had been safe. 

“Hm.”

Dismissive, non-committal around another mouthful of meat but he knew the man. He  _ knew _ him, and that was such a wild, fantastical thing to be able to admit even to himself. Jaskier wanted to hold tight to that information, cradle the gift that it was like a holy sacrament. Tenderness hidden behind measured silences and shrewd topaz eyes, what was it to know this man?

It was to know kindness unenumerated, to know gentle hope and compassion left unspoken.

“Eat your dinner, you softie, before you ruin your reputation.”

It was to see the way that Geralt’s eyes crinkled at their corners with his soft smile, half cloaked in flickering shadows from their fire and to know that Jaskier would bloody himself a thousand times over just to make this man happy.

-

Three parts valerian root, two parts alcohest, five parts mugwort, one part poppy. Let the solids soak for five to ten minutes in the alcohest over a low flame until they began to sponge and fall apart. Remove from the heat and grind into a thick paste. Thin with one part alcohest and two parts clean water, strain through a cloth into prepared bottle.

"Either you drink the damn tincture or I swear, Geralt!"

"Bard."

"I  _ swear _ , Geralt."

Vial clasped in his palm for safety’s sake, it had already been shoved back at him twice.  _ Twice _ , and he had nearly dropped it the first time from shock alone. There was a fine tremble to his hands now, frustration snapping at his heels where it wanted desperately to burst into a full swell of anger. He would do more than just swear if the ridiculous, proud, self-sacrificing man didn't open his mouth and drink the damn bottle.

Another try and it was pushed back again, pressure weaker than the last two times. The air hung thick with blood, wet iron tang that coated his throat until he could barely smell the ichor and swamp rot beneath it. There was so much of it that his armor had been slicked with it, impossible to tell how much belonged to Geralt and how much of it didn't. Too much of it, the answer was always too much even if there was barely any blood, it belonged safe and hot beneath his skin where it could keep the larger man alive. He lost so much of it so easily, but it was worse whenever it coated him as such.

The starlight pale of his hair was stained a deep, sticky crimson, and Jaskier wanted to scream.

One of those broad hands moved as if to paw the bottle back at him but missed, bloodied fingers catching his wrist instead like a dimeritium manacle. Hot to the touch for all the wrong reasons, but Geralt held on instead of pushed. Stared at him with eyes gone glassy and furrowed between, but there must have been something in his face. Maybe he could smell his panic, the tears that Jaskier could feel where they begged to collect heavy along his lower lids and fall. Was his own fear strong enough to be found over the stench of blood and death?

"Alr't."

It must have been, there must have been  _ something _ , because Geralt held his wrist like a fine-boned lifeline he could afford to lose. That grip slid and caught on the front of his tunic before it could hit his lap, battered knuckles taunt where he clung.  _ Clung _ , and never had he thought he could use such a word with the Witcher, not in relation to himself. Geralt clung to his quiet altruism and his beaten pride, his weapons and his horse, he didn't cling to people and certainly never to Jaskier. Except he did in that instant, and the gift tasted like ash in his throat.

"Thank you."  _ For coming back to me, for still breathing, for trusting me  _ went unsaid, but he felt it like a bruise on his ribs where it had begun to sink between them. “Swallow this for me.”

The bottle made contact with bloodied lips this time, cracked and sanguine from the inside. Geralt opened under the gentle pressure, bloodied gums and stained teeth, a deep split in his tongue where he had bitten into the soft muscle. The tincture mixed with the blood pooled there, alcohol surely burning across the open wound as it slid into his throat. Geralt took it without complaint, with exhaustion lidded eyes and seemingly no fight left in his mighty bones. 

Meant to put him to sleep more than anything else, Jaskier could do nothing until the man slipped under. Nothing that wouldn’t add to his pain, that wouldn’t just make everything feel that much worse. 

A hallucinogen at worst if he hadn’t managed his herbs right, but he knew this particular blend from slipping it into Istredd’s ale after too many days spent pouring over translations. There would be no Rience this time to help with distraction, no inappropriate laughter or sharp toothed, salacious innuendos cooed from split lips like some obscene poetry. There was no Istredd, there was no Rience, only the thick canopy above them and Geralt’s blood on his hands. 

Small mercies, he could see the moment that it started to set in. Breathing less measured, the softest glassy touch entered tired topaz eyes, where the Witcher had been carefully still against him he now sagged as the pain began to dampen and dull. 

A long exhale and Jaskier gave a soft smile, bent over as he was to practically hover over the other man. It spoke of his state that Geralt tried to return it, lopsided and slow but a smile if Jaskier had ever seen one on his face. A  _ smile _ , and his heart hurt like that bruised feeling had finally seeped deep enough to touch it. Pool around it like a firebrand vice that he breathed through, gentled a thumb across one bloodied cheekbone with a crackled smear of red beneath his touch. Exhaustion and herbal sedative proved to be the perfect mixture, heavy lids blinking sluggishly at him before they stayed closed and Geralt’s face went slack in sleep. 

Silence upon the trio, Roach having settled herself in a lush patch of grass and it felt like Jaskier could breathe for the first time since he had spotted Geralt’s hand flung out from beneath the Kikimora carcass. The man had barely been conscious, more blood than unmarred flesh, and it had taken everything within him not to panic. Not to scream, the curdle of a Chaos crackling at the base of his skull begging to be let free, but nothing good would come from that. He had tugged Geralt free instead where the man hadn’t been able to pull himself, had gotten him onto Roach only for the real struggle to then begin. 

Impossible, the churlish excuse of a man, but he slept with some of the deep furrows of pain lessened around his eyes while Jaskier breathed through the want to cry. 

The man slept within the deep embrace of overwrought fatigue and heavy-handed herbalism, and that meant that Jaskier could work like he needed to. Geralt’s fingers slipped from his tunic with a palm smear of blood left behind, and his sigh was a sharp, rattling thing where he pulled it through his teeth. It was better that way, less interference possible without points of contact between them and he  _ knew _ that, but that did nothing to quell the screaming that had taken up residence in his skull. That lack of contact meant that he wasn’t a temptation to fall into panic anymore, the slow rise and fall of his broad chest amounted to nothing and everything all at once. 

Jaskier held himself up with a trembling breath, tangled in his chest where it could roil and pool, and his Chaos breathed with him then. 

A warm rush of power from his ribs, centered somewhere beyond his heart and it burned far more sweetly than any fire he could ever hope to breathe. From his chest to his hands, a soft cloud of honeyed colored heat shimmered in the air as it drifted across the prone frame before him. Heartbeat slow but steady, familiar where it thrummed in the quiet of sleep, he focused on that languid rhythm rather than the blood-caked across his hands. Geralt slept in the painless clutch that only Chaos could truly provide, and it was only after an hour under that slumbering trance that the sluggish flow of fresh blood ceased. 

The forest hummed quietly with a song all its own and he would have leaned into it if not for the blood upon his skin. The anxiety in his belly began to cool as that blood turned tacky, congealed against his fingers and palms in the humid air. Blood cooled, wounds oozing sluggishly until the bleeding ceased, and the honeyed heat that had ferried Geralt to sleep lifted the blood from his bruised flesh until it dissipated in the air. His wounds were visible then, a gash across his hairline near his temple that his hair would hide easily enough, a thick cut from shoulder to navel where his hardened leather plackart had been torn open. 

It no longer bled but the leather was stained a red so deep it looked burgundy in the light. It would have been easier to dye it once more with ichor than to remove the blood, but the Kikimora had taken that option from them. Geralt knew his armor had been ruined, the slash across his front testament enough, there was no mending Jaskier could manage that would make a fix like that go unnoticed. He unbuckled it regardless, hands Chaos cleaned and sturdy where he made quick work of the metal fastens and straps. Two years come and gone in the man's company, he knew the intricacies of his armor like he knew his own lute. 

The quiet made it easy to work, it took less time to remove the armor than it had to get the man to drink the cursed tincture. 

It was in the light with soft grass beneath them that Jaskier finally, finally let himself relax. Reverent fingers splayed across where Geralt’s heartbeat quietly beneath his breastbone and he tipped forward until his forehead rested on the man’s shoulder. He would take care of the stitches the man desperately needed in just a moment, it wasn’t as if Geralt could complain. Roach wouldn’t tattle on him, not for the curling prayer that spilled from his lips or the tears that burned down his cheeks. Anxiety seeping away entirely and Jaskier indulged himself with a wet, punched sob that took his breath as he cried for the first time since Kerack. 

-

“Who in their right mind gave you a sword?”

“I’ll have you know I am perfectly skil-”

“You are absolutely ruinous is what you are. A radiant illustration of cataclysmic spoilation given form and flesh. Truly, a parlous cacodemon of blight and depravity.”

“I  _ will _ stab you.”

“Honestly, you intend to stab me? From where, Ban Ard?”

“Aedd Gynvael, if you must know.”

He had misplaced the lid for his rosin tin somewhere on the bed, and his fingers were going to smell of the stuff for days. Beeswax and sap and almond that would stick under his nails, but it needed worked into the grain until it gleamed like amber and woodblood beneath the Ofieri sun. It would have been simpler to enchant the thing and he knew that, but there was a reward to be found in manual labor and the tension that it set in his wrists, the quiet twinge in his shoulders that spoke of a job well done. An enchantment would be over too soon, a price paid but a result far from earned, there would always be something about the process of it all that spoke to his peasant’s soul. 

The room reeked of rosin, and had he not been traveling alone he would have cracked the window open before bed to help dissipate the scent. Snow fell thick outside like a blanket unable to be lifted, heavy wool left to the elements until it went sodden and weighted by more moisture than one could ever hope to ring out. It would cling for weeks, the city bogged down by the crush of snow and ice like there could be no end. There would be no opening the window, not while he valued his delicate bits and his flesh just as there would be no Witcher. Not until spring came, when the Pontar stopped spewing frosted sludge with its current and the first tender crocus of the season sprouted from the thaw.

That left him with the sharp fumes of his rosin and the warm thrum of his Chaos that kept his food warm. No Geralt to watch with his too sharp eyes and his mutagen keen senses, it left Jaskier to his own devices for an entire season with the infinite well of his own power and limitless possibilities.

It left him with a well-loved xenovox balanced on one of the bedposts and the comfort of Istredd's voice.

"They had the lack of forethought in Aedd Gynvael to give  _ you _ a blade?"

“Tergano, actually.”

A wild noise of confusion high in his throat and Jaskier laughed with it, clutching and sleep-deprivation thick where it tried to cling on his tongue. There was something so insulted and scornful about the way Istredd spoke, and even with the distance between them, he could practically see the other man’s face. Knew how his brow would scrunch and his mouth would pull with the expression that always,  _ always _ accompanied that tone of voice. High browed disapproval that he remembered from the refectory, from the library, from high vaulted halls where they had tucked themselves away in a cushioned alcove just to try and get a few moments between the three of them where they could be  _ boys  _ rather than  _ mages _ . 

Istredd would look like Rience had said something exceptionally vulgar, and his laughter tasted a little sad at the edges. 

Tergano though, Tergano wasn’t necessarily good these days, felt more than a little unsafe since Grothur Gvaed had fallen.

Tergano lay past the Amell Mountains, and his own lack of court appointment meant nothing, said nothing to his political knowledge. There had been unrest beyond those mountains for years, a churning upset within Nilfgaard’s borders where her Emperor had turned savage and strange. Fergus var Emreis sat upon the throne as a changed man, but it was impossible to know the extent of it himself without eyes within the palace. Servants spoke, surely, but what lay beyond the Amell peaks wasn’t his purview even if he knew danger by sight or sound alone. 

Istredd had traveled within those treacherous waters, and Jaskier dragged the rosin across Ofeiri rosewood with more force than needed.

“When did you run off to Mag Turga?”

Gentle and curious, distracted kind of conversational even though he could taste the accusation that he wanted to fling. Bite and dig in, a scathing kind of temperamental that they both knew to be born from a learned fear. 

“While you were traipsing around after your Witcher for the last four years.”

Somewhere between soothing and smarmy, fucking  _ learned _ if he had ever heard something that wasn’t naturally theirs come from either of their mouths. The chunk of rosin crumbled to little pieces in his clenched fist that dusted across the duvet like glitter. Everything settled in his bones like the chill that lingered after a burning fever, too much and never enough all at once until he could taste it. Koviri winter chill along the back of his tongue like the candies they used to suck on that turned their breath to colors but there was no sugar now. 

Just an empty ache where there should have been Rience, and the two of them to fill in the vacant spaces where the other man should have been. 

“Now look-”

“You attend your Witcher like most women do a weeping cock.”

How was he meant to respond to  _ that _ ?

It was more than silent past the window for his room, snowflakes falling in thick swatches beyond the gilded glass of the Passiflora. The firelight warmth of his room kept the bitter cold at bay, but there was nothing for the silence that filled the night, nothing for the ice that would glaze the streets beyond his velvet and fur accommodations. 

“ _ Is _ there a weeping cock?”

There was snow outside, but it felt the academic quiet of the library all over again. It felt Rience with his inappropriate laughter over something as juvenile as a city name, it felt like Istredd with his embarrassed avoidance where he refused to make eye contact. He remembered the mouthfeel of his own scathing amusement, ink on his fingers where he couldn’t keep his quill to himself. 

Laughter and home streaked through with moments of shame and terror, his room was suddenly more empty than he could stand.

“Jaskier,  _ is _ there a cock?”

His chest hurt, heart thundering in his ribs with a tender kind of ache, a bruise pressed on for so long that the feeling was almost sweet. He’d become so accustomed to dry affection and gentle intentions hidden behind a gruff exterior that he’d forgotten what it was like to have a brother. 

“ _ Istredd _ , he has a  _ name _ .”

Warm laughter from the little box, it wasn’t the same but it was as close as he could get. He refused to travel to Aedd Gynvael at this time of year, Novigrad already miserable from where the Great Sea had clogged with ice and the air had gone frozen. No further north than Roggveen when the world went cold like this, not if he could help it, but it would have been perfect if it meant he could embrace his brother like he wanted to. 

There were stories on his tongue that begged to be told, Filavandrel and the way that Geralt spoke to his horse like she was his closest confidant. Innocent and aching alike, but he hoarded them on the back of his tongue like a dragon of lore. 

“Melitele’s sopping cunt, what have I ever done to deserve you?”

“I beg your pardon, who teleported who  _ naked _ into the Ban Ard marke-”

“Ah, I apologized for that!”

Another fit of giggles that couldn’t be called anything else, he could only imagine the way Istredd grinned. It would have rivaled his own, certainly, and what a thing it was to feel so happy and melancholy all at once. A lot like memories of  _ savaeds _ lost to time, the peoples long dead even if their ghosts still lived on in his thoughts. There would be no feast this Midinvaerne just like there hadn’t for decades, not like what he knew, but there was Istredd in Aedd Gynvael and Rinivek beyond the Blue Mountains. He could send the latter a missive while he took a pilfered few bottles from an unfortunate Toussaint winery to the former at his frozen post. 

“Tell me of him then, you’re Witcher.”

_ His _ Witcher, simple and decisive but it bloomed like honey in his veins all the same. Made him smile as he spoke, soft and private and adoring in the quiet of his room, and Julian gave a hum and watched his chunk of rosin build back together from its shattered pieces. 

“He has a sweet tooth that shames yours. The man is older than us, but I think he would put honey on everything if we had the supply.”

-

Between a blink and the next, Geralt had left him before he even had the chance to realize that he was alone within the crowded banquet hall. No Witcher to stand beside him, no menace of tender hearted starshine to glower where he couldn’t hide a smile behind his cups. Chaos in its purest form and it had taken his breath with the rush of it all, the scream of it that made his blood run like sunshine through his veins that bubbled and glittered until he breathed euphoria when he sang. An untempered well of something so unadulterated and wild that he didn’t even dare to touch, the child that lived forever in his chest wanted to fall to his knees before the Source that lived within the girls skin. 

The daughter of the Dagorad stood in the shambles of her ball room,  _ Ard Rhena _ with her dark eyes that knew too much and the hatred in her bones that made him want to flee, she knew too much even if she didn’t know him. She wouldn’t recognize him for what he was, not his magic or the glamour that made him look mortal in her ruined banquet, but her druid was smart enough to make him itch. A threat if ever he had known one, the Queen would slaughter him but her druid would be the one to expose him for the creature that he was. No amount of gold should have tempted him, he knew better than to have come here, as if the cold contempt in Master Argim’s eyes hadn’t been lesson enough. 

Istredd would have his head if there was anything left to collect.

A placating murmur to the Countess with her dark hair curls and her plump cheeks, it was easier to slip out unnoticed without the intimidating figure that Geralt cut. Easier, but he felt like a mouse in a den of foxes, cornered and unnoticed by sheer luck alone. It wouldn’t last, his head wouldn’t be his to keep, and Jaskier took the stairs two at a time and pressed around the corner as he fled on silent feet. His companion gone, nobody would notice if he fled faster than he should have, forgettable when he needed to be even if it tasted better to be remembered. 

The Elder that lived in his marrow did nothing to save him past the second stone arch, the quiet of the corridor a farce as a figure fell into step beside him. 

“You’re companion left, Bard.”

Ermion Ynsis walked beside him like he never had in the halls of their school, broad where he had let himself age, where he hadn’t taken to ascension like he should have. Something hadn’t been traded equally, payment had been given for the transaction he had made, something hadn’t been done right. An island welp if ever one had looked at him, the other man had touted the sanctity of Freya and the balance of all things, but he hadn’t paid proper dues to the cosmos. A misalignment for the grey in his hair and the wrinkles upon his face, he exuded a gentle lull of Chaos with every step he took like some kind of cloak. 

Frustration and fear went hand in hand these days, and Jaskier clasped the bright gleam of his masquerade a little tighter with a smile he didn’t feel. 

“Dreadful habit that, getting the man to stay still long enough to practice manners is an uphill battle I’m afraid. I can assure you we’re working on it, but common courtesy tends to be misplaced in the sort of environment where he isn’t paid.”

He had gone out the front where they had come, through the main hall with the uncharacteristic lack of regard that spoke more of Geralt’s state of mind than it should have. A bit of a panic had begun to set in then, the man never got distracted unless he felt cornered, but this was something else all together. 

The Law of Surprise, and he could  _ feel _ the burn of magic still against his skin.

“You aren’t surprised he left you?”

“If I was surprised every time Geralt ran off, I would never get anything done. Now, sir, Mousesack wasn’t it? I would think you would be attending your Queen.”

What sort of self respecting man called himself  _ Mousesack _ ?

Istredd had snickered the first time he had heard  _ Jaskier _ , but his own name at least was far better than this. 

Down the set of stairs and into the main hall, the guards at their posts stood at a practiced parade rest. Tightly wound, they must have at least heard the commotion inside the castle. He doubted anyone with any magical inclination in the entirety of Cintra hadn’t noticed, and it would only be a matter of time before the town started to crawl with mages. All the more reason to put distance between himself and the bloodstone grounds, death had seeped into the foundation of this city and he refused to be fertilizer. 

He would have to be forgiven for the snap of power that burst free as the man caught his arm, the way that the fires flickered and the banners fluttered for but a moment before the world stood still.

Wide eyed where they stood, Ermion held him like he had the right, something like horror on his features like he had only just discovered the viper that he grasped. 

“Release me.”

_ “Julian.” _

A low, spitting sound from within his throat as everything turned frigid and frothed like the Pontar frozen within his blood. He would take the man's hand through a portal with him if it meant he could leave, he would rend flesh from bone if only Ermion let him go. A pressure in his temples and behind his eyes, questing and curious and that icy feeling wobbled and warbled and threatened to upend itself within his chest. His mind slammed shut, protective walls built to the sky behind his eyes and he watched the man stagger then as he was freed. 

Jaskier stepped aside quickly then, and life breathed back into the courtyard just as quickly as it had stalled. The guards breathed, they blinked, armor clinking quietly as they shifted where they stood. The proud Cintran banners fluttered in the crisp breeze as the stars stared down at them in cold, quiet laughter. The world carried on as if it hadn’t stood still at his whim, and Jaskier watched as Ermion trembled in his court robes as he righted himself. 

He would have spat at Destiny if it would have done any good. 

“Don’t let him run from this. The Law of Surprise is not something to be trifled with, you can’t let him ju-”

“Go back to your Queen, Ynsis.”

He had never spoken as such at the academy. 

He had never spoken much at all, not to anyone who wasn’t Istredd or Rience, not after the way Devran had writhed and screamed on his cushion. The boy had been Ermion’s friend, undoubtedly as close as he and his two companions had been. Ermion knew enough, had watched the accidental way he had flayed the other boys mind to pieces until nothing salvageable remained. He knew what Jaskier had been capable of then, and he knew now that Jaskier walked amongst them still. 

“Follow the Yaruga to the east.”

Known enough, another brush of Chaos and the familiar weight of his lute hit his back, it’s case looped around his shoulder where it should have been to begin with. Ermion knew, the guards were paid to forget, they never should have come here. The Selkiemore in Nastrog and they should have continued north-east as planned. They would have made good time through Bodrog and well into Burgge if he had kept his tongue and his greed to himself. A veiled attempt to give Geralt a good time, and look where it had gotten them. Further tangled with things they couldn’t control and exposed like they shouldn’t have been. 

No amount of coin was worth the silence that set like an infection as he left the druid behind to find his Witcher. 

-

He was short of all of his marbles. There had enver been any there to begin with, regurgitated humor that he had learned from somewhere and not a single, independent thought between his ears. The man must have been dropped on his head before the Trails, already half empty before they fried his brain further with all of their magic and chemicals until he was a good little dog that communicated in grunts and spitting aggression and abandonment. 

Not a single damn marble remained in the man's head, no space for them with all the potions and decoctions and codex he’d had to memorize. Jaskier didn’t know why he’d bothered, didn’t know why he’d tried to even think that Geralt might possess something as simple as common sense. 

He didn’t know which was worse, the bladed reminder that the Witcher would never be  _ his _ , or the fact that Yennefer of Vengerberg was as beautiful and terrible as his mind had led him to believe. 

No man could love her and survive her, not with any self preservation running through their system. Istredd hadn’t made it out the same, still talked about her when Jaskier got him far enough into his cups. It only made sense that a Witcher wouldn’t be immune to her charms. But he had hoped, he had practically pleaded on his knees with Dana Meadbh just to be given silence instead. To be rewarded for his heartache with the sight of Geralt balls deep in a woman that assuredly must have been the embodiment of insanity, Lilit sent and unhinged. 

No, not a single damn marble to be found, and somewhere between his panic and his pain, his control nearly broke. 

The delicate golden bauble still hung from his ear, but she  _ knew _ , and Yennefer of Vengerberg resembled an ifrit unchained with her vicious glee. How Istredd had ever seen anything in her was a mystery beyond him, but he wished bitterly that she had never made it to ascension. That she had stayed trapped in whatever creaking, horrible amalgamate she had once been, the dilution of their blood would never be kind to human form. She should have died with her sisters like a good little flower.

He came to a halt in the middle of the path, nausea and shame enough to make him gag. Stomach tight and his throat seized with it, the feeling bringing forth a fresh wave of panic that had him breathing hard and fast. Quick pulls of air that didn’t work, didn’t help, he could breathe but he could feel it still. Fat weight in his throat that had swelled his tongue and stolen his voice, trapped everything off until he had burbled and choked on his own blood and gasped for wheezing breaths that burned like liquid fire. None of the burnt flesh and orchard smoke but the same terror that tasted like Kerack, there were no bloodied walls to contain him but the cloudless blue sky hurt just the same. 

Like he couldn’t breathe, impossible to tell the difference between where that tumor had swelled and where Stregobor’s fist had clenched. 

He staggered where he stood, lute case clacking against his back. Blue sky and a winding, lush field all around him, and he watched dimly as smoking trendils of grey swept in along his periphery. Breathless as his body throbbed quietly with the beats of his heart, it was easier like this, less to look at when that grey seeped and spread until the sky didn’t look quite so blue. 

None of the smoke or the rot or the screaming, but he could still smell blood down the front of himself, copper and iron and rust that coated his tongue and filled his mouth. 

“-skier, Jaskier,  _ breathe!” _

An arm around his waist, his body pulled against a strong chest as his legs gave out. The sky and the trees and the fields swam with their gossamer grey smoke tinge muting all the colors, his body went down like a dead weight. He would have fallen if sure hands hadn't caught him, hadn't kept him close and safe like a mockery of an embrace. This wasn't his anymore, he didn't get to have this even before it had started, chance taken by violet eyes and an ample bosom.

He must have made some sort of sound, a rattling cry that he could feel the vibrations of even if he couldn't hear it. 

Pale hair and strong hands, the smell of woodsmoke and leather and the sun lush heat of the wild, Geralt tucked him against the width of his chest to the mutagen slow thump of his heart like that was exactly where Jaskier belonged.

"I'm here, I'm here."

-

  
  


Geralt had kicked up dirt and taken off some time ago, a Forktail spiraling high in the distance and the agreement that they would meet at Ard Carraigh that had been less like pulling teeth and more like an actual agreement. 

The wind rippled through the Kaedwenian plains like a song made of sweetgrass and pollen, a reed and birdsong symphony if one just stopped to listen. The Continent had begun to take the first few steps into summer just the week prior, but the temperature had climbed dramatically. Flush heat across the plains that had chased him out of his doublets and down to his travel tunic, but even the worn linen felt too much. Dampened with sweat and it did its best to cling to his ribs, the underside of his arms where moisture had gathered and worked well to remind him of his own stench. He hadn’t had a good wash in days, but there would be no escaping it between the lack of clouds overhead and the humidity that held like a fretful child even at night. 

Propriety be damned, there was nothing to judge him but the birds and the insects for how his tunic gaped wide down nearly to his breastbone where he had left it undone. The sleeves rolled to his elbows and it had been enough that morning, but the rising sun had objected to what comfort he could hope to find. His boots had become naught but a reenactment of boats and his calves had begun to ache some time ago. Miserable and damp and labor sore and Jaskier reveled in the feeling. 

Time changed everything it seemed, but it couldn’t drive away the wild soul that still lived inside him. Rinivek had encouraged him to embrace the havoc that laced through his bones, taught him to breathe with that fire less it swallow him whole. The world was his arena if only he let himself have it, but Jaskier found simple comfort with dirt on his skin and the endless sky stretched high above. There was beauty in the things that had turned to dust beneath the crush of the seasons, there were stories to be found in the bend of ancient tree branches and the courses that rivers had cleaved for themselves. He didn’t have time for a monarch when he belonged to the sun and the stars, there was no need for a court when the world waited for him with open arms. 

He hadn’t been this far north in a few seasons, the spires of Ban Ard off in the east far out of sight. He knew the way to them with eyes closed, a freefall through a portal would have been all it took to leave him in that bustling market that crowded the feet of the castle. Spiced honey cakes and familiar streets that he had been dragged through, the square he where he had learned to dance a dirty, illicit waltz. Familiarity to the east with silenced demons and remembered screams within cold stone walls, he would return to childish glee pocked with repeated terror if he took that step.

Ban Ard to the east, Aedd Gynvael to the north where Istredd had made temporary roots for himself in the archeological splendor that filled the mountains. He could have gone somewhere,  _ anywhere _ , but that would be it. Geralt was too close yet for a portal to go unnoticed, his sudden disappearance would only leave the man to leap to the worst kind of conclusions. Because his friend had opinions about mages, a deep rooted distaste that made all too much sense given the slaughter that had befallen Kaer Morhen. He understood, but that didn't mean he had to like it, and too much time had passed for such an admittance to be taken lightly.

More than a decade in each others company, both his power and his inhuman nature had gone unspoken, to bring it up now would be to say that he had lied.

Geralt's trust was a delicate, hardwon thing, and Jaskier held it in unworthy hands.

-

A tavern in Ellander was the same as a tavern in Kagen or Tridam, low ceilings and too many people stuffed into a single place. The rich scent of roasted meat soured with the sticky of human sweat, ale that would still be just strong enough with the autumn heat that clung on furiously. More tables than should have fit in a room of its size, a staircase leading up to rooms that wouldn’t have had a good scrub in a few days and beds that he didn’t necessarily trust. The chance for claustrophobia to set in like a fever, fast and furious if given half the chance. 

It couldn’t reach him where he stomped on the top of a table, where he could gaze out over the top of the heads of the peoples that had flocked for the tavern as the sun began to set. Whatever fear might have found its footing here couldn’t, didn’t have the space to speak around his voice and how he sang to the masses and the rafters. Ale sloshed across the tabletop from rattled tankards, the people were too far in their cups to notice what they had lost until they tried to drink from an empty mug. It made the space beneath his feet slick, took half the friction until he slid upon the wood like it was any ballroom floor he had ever danced across. They moved their fingers if they wanted to keep them even as the masses stomped along with the beat he had given them earlier. They were far from perfect, too much alcohol in their bodies for them to have any organized grace, but he didn’t need them to be good. 

He wanted their attention, he needed their coin.

The former had been on him since he had begun his set some hours prior, the later steadily collecting in the deep stone bowl he had dropped on their table in the corner. 

Sharp eyed and face half obstructed by his tankard, the Witcher sat on his bench like a paupers throne of shadow and smoke and weathered wood. The flickering tavern light danced across his armored frame, cut along the chainmail and hardened leather panels of his vambrace and plackart until he looked the part of a feral king. There was a ballad hidden there, a song cycle at least if he let himself dwell, but he knew the truth that beneath the mans fearsome visage. There was a golden heart within the armored barrel of his chest, protected by silver and steel and cutting teeth that Jaskier knew well.

That tankard was the last line of defense the Witcher had to hide the small smile that Jaskier knew was there. He  _ knew _ , knew the way the man’s eyes crinkled at the corners just so, the particular set of his brow. More than a decade in the man's company and Jaskier knew his tells, the way he held his shoulders when he tried not to laugh or the resolution clench of his jaw.

There was a smile tucked away behind that tankard and Jaskier  _ reveled _ in its presence.

That smile meant everything, every bit of laughter like kindling for his soul and he collected every instance of it like a magpie in the spring. 

His boots made a resounding sound on the table as he stomped across the top, the drunken slurring caroling from the patrons almost a cushion as he leaped to the floor. The faintest tension burn in his knees that tried to leech up into his thighs, Jaskier danced out of the way of questing fingers from a man both too far in his cups and too eager to touch things he shouldn’t. Any other tavern, any other time, he would have leaned a little closer to the offer, would have pressed himself a little further into the possibility of seeing what that man might have to keep himself entertained with. It would have eaten up a few hours at least, he was far too guilty already about trying to distract himself with the flesh of another when Geralt ran and hid between the spread of Yennefer’s thighs. 

There was no Yennefer this time, and he recognized that questioning heat even if he’d never seen it in Geralt’s eyes before. 

Distance between them closed with every swaying step, it was only when he was close enough to nab Geralt’s tankard did he see the faint flush upon his statuesque features. The most delicate of pinks painted on his sharp cheeks and Jaskier yearned to touch, wanted to know the heat that bloomed there with his own fingers. He drank from the stolen tankard instead, ale still chilled from how it had recently been topped off by a heavy-handed barmaid. Rancorous applause and inebriated shouting drowned out his voice finally, finally, as he sat himself astride the table with a kick of his feet and his lute securely nestled in his lap.

It couldn't have been a trick of the light, the way Geralt watched him. That bashful smile that hinted at the dimples he knew lurked in those cheeks, something so sweet it ached in the man's expression. Geralt had only ever looked at him like that in dreams and Jaskier could have cried. His heart beat a furious tempo all its own within his chest, a war drum and a festival chant that made him nearly dizzy, made his head spin.

He could taste the glittering burn of Kerackian rain in his throat as Geralt tipped slowly aside, watched him.

"Having fun?"

Never much of a fan of ale, but the sweet honeyed liquor was balm enough on his aching throat until tea in the morning. It covered his own smile, occupied the besotted tangle of his lips and tongue until he could find himself again. 

"Are we?"

_ We _ , never  _ I _ , rarely ever  _ you _ if he could help it. The both of them had been isolated for years for reasons all their own, but Jaskier refused to let that loneliness linger between them.

The firelight dim and the long shadows given to them like a gentle reprieve, that smile was his and his alone. The masses could have his songs and his stories just as they could have Geralt's sacrifice and his swords, but there were things that couldn't be understood or shared. The soft-spoken way the man dealt with children, the tender care he afforded the sick and the needy, the golden delicate that breathed within the Witcher's body was his to cherish and nurture. The way Geralt smiled at him was  _ his _ , slow and rapturous, the sort of magic he would let eat him alive.

"Do you know," A question bracketed with a question with a question, they were having that kind of night. Geralt had had that much ale, enough that he was more loose lipped in public than he ever cared to be. Slow spoken, words carefully chosen, the man rested on one bent arm, on one shoulder as his head tipped like the curious pup he denied ever being. "That you smell like the last day of spring?"

Swallowing thickly, there was a warmth on his face that couldn't be mistaken for the ale or his exhaustion. Tongue across his mouth, burning topaz eyes followed the motion and Jaskier took another deep breath.

"Like Belletyn, hot honeyed wine and smoke."

Warm fingers work roughened against his own, Geralt touched his hand like such a thing was common between them. Took his tankard and Jaskier's hand with it by proxy, cupped the both of them as he brought the tankard back to his mouth. His thumb brushed the chapped swell of his bottom lip as the man drank, and Jaskier watched, ever the enraptured captive.

More than a decade of wanting had brought him here, pinning and frustration had delivered him to a crowded tavern with a drunken crowd in Ellander that wouldn't remember much of them come morning. Another tavern in another town that would be left behind before the season changed. They would forget the Witcher even if they didn't forget his deed, their lives would go on even after the Path took them from here. 

"What do you think I taste like, then?"

These people would forget, but Jaskier wouldn't.

Hundreds of years from now, and he would remember the way Geralt's cat-golden eyes had glittered like thin rings of amber around his widened pupils. He would know the way that Geralt leaned into the touch to his cheek and the perfect way his face could be cupped, how he came forward almost eagerly when Jaskier led. The woodsmoke scent of him, the undercurrent of chamomile that clung to his skin and the hot rush of his breath against Jaskier's face. Nothing would make him forget the heavy weight of the man's hand on his thigh like a brand, or how their noses bumped and brushed as he pressed their mouths together in a chaste, languid kiss.

Soft mouthed and Geralt opened beneath him, the hot slick of his searching tongue enough to make Jaskier whimper, the sound lost against the occupied roar of the room. Calluses dragging against jeweled violet silk from his thigh to his hip, the burning touched encouraged his legs to spread wider, his body pulled just so across the table. Lute thunking quietly against the wood with a resonating sound that he felt more than heard, Geralt's fingers moved like a brand across his skin, thumb digging into the sensitive, throbbing vein in the hollow between hip and thigh.

Breath a moan against the man's mouth, Jaskier felt the way the Witcher smiled against his lips,  _ tasted it _ , and tried to suckle the taste off of his tongue. 

The rest of the tavern didn't mean shit, not when the other man leaned forward between his spread thighs and kissed his mouth like he had wanted to for years. Like he had pinned for this just as long as Jaskier had, like he knew. 

The tankard hit the table with a wet slosh of ale across their laced fingers, sticky and cool. Enough to make him laugh quietly into the velvet plush of Geralt's mouth. Something about the motion or the sound, those fingers dug into his skin as Geralt huffed against his tongue. The clutch of his mouth just enough to swallow any sounds he might have made, but the Witchers touch was a barbed temptation that sank into his abdomen and pulled. Rolled his hips forward as those fingers gave insistent touches along the plump of his confined cock.

" _ Geralt." _

Rougish smile against his lips, the sharp bite of fangs to kiss reddened flesh had him gasping, sensitive and trembling for the slightest touch. Another biting kiss that had his fingers tangling in silvery hair as he tried to keep the other man close. 

A tavern was no place for this, for them, Geralt pressed at his belly until Jaskier broke from his mouth with another soft, wanting sound. The hand on his cock lifted to take his, unwound his fingers from the man's hair with a knowing look as he rose to stand. He loomed over Jaskier like the predator the world knew him to be until Jaskier tipped back to follow his face as he stood. Bared his throat and hooked one foot about the man's calf, felt the rumbling growl that rattled in the man's chest. 

"Get your coin, Bard." Spoken like a promise, like a threat, words breathed against his temple like a curse. "You still owe me a taste."

Jaskier didn't move as the man stalked across the tavern floor, followed the cut of his figure through shadows and the drunken masses as he disappeared up the stairs. It took everything he had to take his lute up with the care she deserved and return her to her hardened leather case. His hands shook as he took up the bowl filled with coin and separated it between their two coin pouches, bulged more than he cared for with no way for their weight to be discreet but he could fix that later in their room. Later, he could deal with that  _ later _ , like he could deal with the ale that had sunk into his sleeve and the way his throat ached from all the time he had spent earning them that coin. 

Now was the time to drop the bowl and half-filled tankard at the bar as he passed. Now was the time for wriggling his way through the mesh of townspeople as they laughed amongst themselves and forgot he even existed. Now was the time for taking to the stairs, and he did. 

Practically flew up them and the wood creaked underfoot, two at a time until he could skid across the landing with his lute case crashing against his hip. His heart throbbed like it thought it could come out of his chest, he knew the taste of wanting now for how it came from Geralt’s lips against his own. 

Their door wasn’t locked, but the  _ lack _ did nothing to calm him and instead, whatever leading, teasing question he had meant to voice died behind his teeth. 

Tucked on his side across the bed like he had fallen there, the Witcher’s chest rose and fell slowly in his intoxicated slumber. Twisted like he had tried to sit only to misjudge the distance, he could only imagine how quickly the man must have gone down. Loose silver hair across the pillow, he wore his armor still, he wore his  _ boots _ still, with a childish breed of unaware that Jaskier couldn’t help but smile at. His blood still bubbled with arousal, body more than ready for what he had so suddenly been denied, but there was no denying the tender, bruised feeling that the sight stamped into his heart.

Quietly, he shut the door behind him, leaned his weight into it as he slid the lock in place. It was with that same silent longing that he set his lute upon the little table with the Witcher’s swords and toed off his own boots. Removed his violet and burnished gold doublet with slow motions, folded the silk upon itself until he could tuck it within the open droop of his pack. This saved it from being ripped from his shoulders like he had hoped it might be and he shook his head at the notion. The doublet was too expensive for that, he couldn’t return to Cintra for another two seasons at least and didn’t have the money or the time to replace it just because he wanted to be manhandled. 

It was sweet, the bruised, delicate feeling that slowly seeped in and overwhelmed the lust that had lit through his body. He knew what it tasted like to be wanted, and he knew now the feeling of Geralt’s mouth against his own. Like a kind of fire he wanted to feed, the center of a storm that he wanted to strand himself in and never leave the epicenter. It was everything he had wanted, but it was a mouthful where he had wanted a feast, the cruelty of a starving man brought to market and chained to a post. 

The floral honeyed, chamomile and smoke on his tongue was surely what love tasted like then, and Jaskier savored every drop of it as he went about taking the boots and hidden weapons off of his slumbering Witcher. 

-

Morning came with cold feet pressed against his calves and a mouthful of pale hair that he spat out with a series of quiet coughs. Talking hadn’t been an option when Geralt slept like the hungover dead, the copious amounts of ale and White Gull he had ingested enough to keep him down for a few hours at least. It gave him time to bathe and slip from their room to feed Roach a truly unnecessary amount of oats and apples given the morning hour. A small pull from his Chaos to check on the state of his affairs showed that his new doublet set would be finished by the time they reached Tridam, provided he could get the man to actually travel that way. 

It wouldn’t be hard, the approaching season always brought with it a slew of Griffin’s and other flying beasts eager and territorial with the onset of their mating season.

Geralt rolled out of bed some two hours later, a rats nest in place of his hair that he combed out with a wince over his late breakfast. Donned his armor once more, distributed their temporary surplus of coin between multiple pouches and did a final sweep of their room to make sure nothing would be left behind. As if Jaskier would ever be so careless as to leave something, and his grumbling had been met with a sardonic smile that nearly had him stumbling upon the stairs. 

Roach saddled, the sun overhead and the air promised to be miserable with the brutal remains of autumn bearing down upon them. 

They didn’t talk about it.

They didn’t talk about it, and with every step north and every moment passed between them, Jaskier breathed and swallowed past the steady realization that they wouldn’t talk about it.

-

“It’s quite garish, don’t you think?”

Twisted aside, he stared at his profile in the mirror with a faint pout as the seamstress hovered. Stiff in the shoulders but scalloped and ruched upon the arms and down either side of the golden fastens that trailed down the front. The studs themselves would be almost hidden amongst the detailing when they were latched together and he trailed his fingers down them like silent chords. Traced his thumb nail along the network of seams to feel the texture of the scaled pattern that had cost him twice as much gold.

Brilliant crimson like blood against his skin, it looked like a dream with the steel toned chemise tucked loosely into high waisted trousers. 

Jaskier stared at the regal imposter in the mirror and tilted his head aside, watched the man do the same.

“I think it looks rather bold.”

-

“Run, little bird, if you value yourself at all.”

Never even at his lowest had he thought he would ever see Yennefer of Vengeberg  _ cry _ . A creature as tempestuous and proud as she should never be reduced to such a thing, not when the world trembled beneath her feet. It felt like a transgression so perverse he should have averted his eyes, should have given some form of sacrifice in recompense. Like anything he could do or say would be enough to pardon every offense and misdeed this damned mountain had given them. 

She stalked past him with a sharpness to her step that felt an awful lot like running. Like  _ he _ should have run like she told him to, like the worst thing on this mountain was his Witcher. 

Turning, watching her go over his shoulder, Jaskier smacked his hands against his hips and thighs in a futile effort to get rid of some of the dust that coated him. They’d been on this rock too long, hair gone stiff from the dirt and the brilliant crimson of his doublet set dulled until it mimicked a faded carmine. Like he hadn’t paid more than a nauseating amount of gold for it to be blazingly vivid and waited an entire season for the piece to be completed. 

Yennefer looked just as terrible, like she hadn’t bothered to expend her chaos anymore to keep herself pristine. Her lack of vivacious appeal didn’t seem to be all that important anymore, not with the wet crackle to her voice and the way the air around her glittered with barely contained electricity. 

Clear skies as far as the horizon sprawled, a halo of blue everywhere he looked, but he could taste the storm brewing. 

She had left first, abandoned her stolen prize like it had lost its shine, and he watched her as she took the thin, craiged path back to the camp. As she  _ left _ , back turned like she had given up entirely, and he wondered what had wounded her enough for that. Her pride, surely, an arrogant, spiteful she-demon if he had ever known one, but there was something different here. There was something impossibly sad about the set of her shoulders and the bite to her words that felt like a warning. 

Geralt remained on the summit, and there was a bitter, acrid film on his teeth at the thought of leaving the man like that. 

His Witcher could demand solitude all he wanted, denounce the need for company like he was better than that, but Jaskier knew him. He knew the man like he knew his own heart, foolish and aching as it was where it lived in sword-roughened hands. 

Mindful to keep his steps loud as he picked up the path, the climb was broken by the familiar sight of too much weight on armored shoulders. His hair needed a wash more than Jaskier’s did, pale strands a dust clogged mass of tangles that he wanted to ease his fingers through. There would be a headache there, proof of it in the throbbing veins at his temples and the set of his jaw, but Geralt looked...small. Like he had tried to pull in on himself to make a smaller target, the sort of feral behavior that spoke more of a wounded animal than the man he knew. 

“What a day!” Arms out, mindful of his balance and the shifting rock underfoot, Jaskier pinwheeled a little where he stood. Telegraphed his movements like he hadn’t had to do since the fuckery with the Striga, man gone twitchy for months. Old habit that felt less like the life he had made for himself and more like the Academy, but it was enough. “I imagine you’re probably-”

“Damn it, Jaskier!”

His name wasn’t supposed to sound like that, and Jaskier flinched back like he  _ didn’t _ . 

Rage like he had never seen directed at him, molten eyes like the sun that wanted to burn him to the hollow husk of his skeleton he had spent decades trying to forget. He knew fear for the icy fist it clenched around his heart, the phantom hand he could feel wrapped around his throat all over again. Twenty years and Geralt had never roared like that, like he would tear him to pieces if Jaskier happened to step too close. Geralt kept him safe, but he felt like a boy of seventeen again, skin too tight and his heart thundering in terror within his ribs. 

“Why is it whenever I find myself in a pile of shit these days, it's you, shoveling it?”

A rhetorical question, he wasn’t supposed to answer that. It was safer not too, better to keep his mouth shut,  _ Julian wasn’t it? _

“That’s not fair.”

His chest hurt, body going numb as the cold swept in, spilled down his throat until he couldn’t breathe. It tasted like ash, like spend he was forced to swallow with cold fingers pinched on his nose as his head swam, this wasn’t fair. It wasn’t  _ fair _ , a furious tremble starting in his bones as he started to rattle apart from the inside. As he felt the slumbering coals in his lungs beg to breathe, to take him with them this time until nothing remained, he wouldn’t survive this time, he wouldn’t. He didn’t want to die by this fire anymore, he didn’t want to burn, but Jaskier couldn’t breathe past the rage that stared at him in a face that should have been familiar. 

He looked less like Geralt then and more like-

“The Child Surprise, the djinn, all of it!” Screaming hadn’t helped him then and it wouldn’t now, his own personal wraith forcing its fingers down his throat again to silence him. He didn’t look like Geralt then, a stranger as his hatred consumed him and twisted him into someone unrecognizable. A Hym, a Penitent that knew him down to his blackened, rotted core, he wondered with a touch of hysteria if the man would use silver or steel to take his head. “If life could give me one blessing, it would be to take you off my hands!”

The words echoed across the mountain top around them, howled to the sky in a demand to be heard. Geralt where he panted and heaved with his rage, but as he turned it was Stregobor, cold eyed and sneering and he felt himself slip. 

“Right. Right, then. I'll go get the rest of the story from the others.” Hollow words from a tongue that had already started to decompose, there were two sets of shoulders there, two sets of hands. The man he thought he knew cloaked in the specter of the one he knew too well, he had ruined this too, had infected the Witcher with the same blight that festered in his marrow. Jaskier swallowed and tasted decay, and he watched as smoke spewed from between his lips. ”See you around, Geralt.”

Like he smelled the burn of it, like he  _ knew _ , Geralt turned as he took a stumbling step back. Jaskier watched topaz eyes go wide, expression falling into a horrified kind of confusion as the world rippled and threatened to catch fire. He could feel it, the promise of a heat that would give him the end he deserved, it would devour him completely this time until nothing but ash was left on the mountain. 

He couldn’t, he  _ couldn’t _ , he would take Geralt with him if he did that, he had already ruined enough. 

The air ripped open behind him instead, the glitter of the portal flickering at the edges of his vision. It danced like a promise, like an absolution he had done nothing to deserve, and Jaskier let himself fall.

“Jaski-”

Fat clouds drifted slowly overhead, the world filled with the gentle melody of birdsong. His body ached when he hit the ground, dropped from the sky like even it didn’t want to keep him. The portal snapped shut above, stitched together in a flash of coral light as reality seamed back together again. Birdsong and a soft breeze that caressed his skin as his body throbbed from the impact, grass beneath his head and skimming the edges of his vision. 

Waves crashed in the distance, thunderous and musical like the most vicious of deliverances.

Drooped slightly like it was heavy, like it had grown so long and lush it couldn’t quite hold itself upright anymore, the dandelion blossom peeked down at him from the top of his field of view. Bobbed faintly in the tranquil Kerakian costal breeze like there was nothing more important than its roots and the salt in the air. 

He sobbed, punched and wounded and damning, the sound violent in the empty calm that filled the overgrown remains of the Pankratz Estate. Screaming, hands pressed to his face and his palms punishing where they ground against his closed eyes, his tears burned where they cut through the mountain dirt and dust. 

Jaskier, Julian, Kailefyr grieved while the birds and the waves and the dandelion kept watch. 


End file.
